If you're looking to improve your drum mixes, let
me give you three quick tips to try out over the weekend.
As you may already know, I'm teaching a brand-new drum mixing masterclass TODAY (in less than 12 hours), so if you'd like to learn a proven, repeatable drum mixing process that helps you transform your drums from puny to powerful, register now before it's too late.
Throughout the years I've developed an extensive set of techniques to shape my drum sounds based on some very common problems that you may face as well.
Here are three for your drum mixing toolkit:
Kick Drum Not Cutting
Through?
If the kick isn't cutting through the mix, here are two things to try:
- Boost the high-mids around 1.2 kHz up to 3 kHz to enhance the sound of the beater.
- If that doesn't work, try using a transient designer to shape the attack of the drum envelope. This is often better than a high-mid boost because it's just shaping the initial transient of the signal and not changing the frequency response of the kick drum as a whole.
Is Your
Snare Too Thin?
If you snare is weak and lacking in the mix, try these things:
- Add gentle saturation, like a tape or a tube emulation to make it warmer in the low-mids.
- Use a snare-stretch reverb to add bigness to your snare without creating additional space or reverb in your drum sound
Are overheads Too Harsh?
If your cymbals are too bright and harsh, do this:
- Add multi-band compression to tame
the high-mid frequencies. This works especially well if all you have is a stereo drum track and you don't want to affect the kick and snare with too much compression.
- Use the search and destroy method to find the harshest frequencies in the high-mids with an EQ and simply cut it out with a broad cut. This works better if you have individual control over just the cymbals.
Hopefully those three will help you out.
If you want more, you'll benefit from watching the entire drum mixing process from beginning to end.
Luckily you can do that today when you register from my drum mixing masterclass right here.
Looking forward to teaching you!
Björgvin