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Mixing live drums

1

Although we’re working with a set of live recordings, everything we’re about to do applies equally to a virtual drum kit plug-in. Such plug-ins will ideally give you total control over mic bleed – a definite plus. So, here are our nine tracks/channels: Kick, Snare (Top and Bottom), Hi-hats, Floor Tom, Rack Tom, Overheads and L/R Room. 2

There’s a bit of spill from the snare and toms in the Kick channel, so we insert a gate plug-in to clean it up. We set the Threshold to -16dB in order to let only the kick through, the Attack and Hold times to 0ms, the Lookahead to 6.8ms, and the Release to 310ms – long enough to let the full decay of the drum ring out. We do this with the Kick channel soloed, as no context is required for purely corrective work. 4

There’s a lot of sympathetic resonance coming from the Rack Tom channel, and we need to gate out the bleed into the Floor Tom mic, too. We load gates onto each channel, both set to -9dB Threshold, with Release times of 351ms for Rack and 414ms for Floor. There’s still a bit of bleed at the end of the Floor Tom hit, but there’s no way to avoid that if we’re wanting to keep the sustain. 3

Let’s up the kick’s power and definition. We EQ first, activating a low-cut filter at 30Hz to remove headroom-eating ultralows, boosting by a hefty 6.5dB at 70Hz for welly, boosting 5.5dB at 5.4kHz for ‘click’, and cutting 9dB at 152Hz and 445Hz to reduce boxiness and make space. Our compressor is set to catch every hit at a 9:1 Ratio, with a long enough Attack to let the transient through. 5

We tackle our Snare Top and Bottom channels together. Again, there’s plenty of spill into both mics from the other channels, so we set up a pair of gates to do away with as much of it as possible without killing any ghost notes. This is only mildly effective, but it makes enough of a difference to the track to warrant doing, drying out the Bottom Snare track in particular.

COMPUTER MUSIC