Hi there,

I’m fairly new to mixing live drums and although I have lots of stems from rock/pop tracks with full drum stems as a reference, they’re never split up into their components e.g. kick snare overheads etc. As a self taught, I don’t actually yet know what overheads (for example) are meant to sound like, only the kit as a whole, so it’s very trial and error. Is there anywhere I can find professionally mixed stems of a live drum kit to reference?

Thanks

 

Hello, how are you? I'm doing like you, something similar to what you're looking for. I perform live and separate the drums and bass from the songs to then play along with my guitar. Regarding the individual tracks, there is a VST that splits the frequencies, I don't remember the name, but I'm not completely satisfied with it. But if what you're looking for are tracks from bands like Staind (kick, snare, cymbals), there's a Russian torrent that has a torrent called "Rock Band multitracks". There you will find a large number of isolated instrument tracks from bands. I'm not sure if all the songs have the kick, snare, etc., but many of them do. I hope this helps, greetings.

 

Overheads are not meant to sound like something particular. They are a bunch of mics placed 'overhead' high above the kit to capture the overall kit sound AS WELL AS the room ambience, so every track or source is different. They are mainly used originally for orchestral music but with the advent of the DAW every mic in every position seems to be available but not necessarily needed to be used. Drumkits are played by a real human and in the old days a few mics placed around inc. on snare and hats and bass would have sufficed. Studio time is precious so there wouldn't normally be time to record each individual piece of the kit. And with lots of spillage across the tracks an overall balance is usually aimed for. Best place to find what your looking for is at a recording studio or listen to a lot of varied songs. There is no set formula. If there was we would likely all be using the template. There is also a lot of Mix Master series that is available where you can gleam information from the engineers working on particular songs and their workflow.

 

Take a look at the Cambridge multitrack library: https://www.cambridge-mt.com/ms/mtk/