Hello all.

I am having a hard time with my drums here recently and I'm not sure what to do. no book, or video tutorials are giving a clear outline on what to do.

so this pertains mainly to pop and hip hop drums...i think.

so I've seen plenty of videos of people with "balanced" mixes with faders at -6db here and another channel with -8db over there. but there's no processing, zero plugins. after they adjust the volume they add eq compression etc..

but from what I've learn gain staging is getting the signal clear through all your plugins at -18dbfs BEFORE you touch the fader.

so are they wrong? or is this a different type of mixing ?

that all is kind of intro to my over all question. What is the order of drum mixing?

here's what i do currently (which has to be incorrect)

1.eq cuts
2. compress
3. eq boost.
4. compress
5. create a send to drum room
6 NY parallel compress
7 parallel saturation

i check gain on each step of this to insure im not going over -18dbfs rms

send to drum bus
eq to taste
compress to taste.

out to master bus.



so i know I'm missing some steps but I'm not quite sure where they go in the process or if my process is complete wrong from top to bottom.

this i know I'm missing:
clipping
limiting
eq balancing with pink noise?
Volume balancing with pink noise.
please add more if i missed something.


if anyone would be willing to share their insight on this id be extremely grateful and of course id love this to open up other discussions on drum mixing in general.

THANKS

 

I think you should bounce a clip of your drum group and link it. The genre of music you are working with can make a certain workflow a good way to mix your drum group, and then have it be a bad workflow for another. You should at least mention the genre and even the style within the overall genre.

 

Correct. If you aim to preserve as much of the dynamic range and actual tonality of the drums you would process minimally and use the fader and maybe some EQ to move things forward and backward.

The 18db RMS was the saturation point for some older hardware, it is still the target of just before breakup on some modeled gear.

I don't think there is a right or wrong here.

If you don't like what you have now, then its not right for you but that doesn't necessarily make it wrong for someone else.

 

I try to balance the individual sounds first in regard to the relationship between the transient and the body of the sound.
For example, I tend to use a clipper on the snare drum right away most of the time. The transient of the snare in my experience is the loudest part of the whole drum set, even the whole mix. It will complicate or even completely mess up the mixing process. If you don't get this right first you will not be able to get a good overall balance because one or several of the transients are far too loud in comparison to everything else. You can at times shave off up to 6 sometimes even 12 db and the snare will still sound completely fine. You could use compression, but as it is just the transient clipping works better in my opinion. Even with a very fast compressor it is difficult to catch it properly. If you have other parts with very loud transients, you can use clipping/compression there as well. After that everything seems to fall into place nicely.

 

Just use JJ's bus chain. Free internet bus chain

 

There is simply no recipe that always works. I personally proceed as follows: I make sure that everything is phase aligned and my relative levels are good. Then I do the rough balance on the bus. Some EQ, a bit of compression. Maybe some saturation. Then I work my way down the hierarchy and see if anything can be removed or is missing. A few notches here, some clipping there, fill in under-represented frequency ranges with parallel processing, etc. Done, move on.