What's up there? Tone chasing is a never ending journey as I was tweaking my drums and guitars today for better sounds even though I knew my mix was good at the start of the first post. Check out my new samples as our case today is drums.
Uncompressed drums: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16hnx1wMk4-21HkUxNhPFmKXMff8_vzgr/view?usp=drivesdk
Compressed drums: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16Z4PZTt0kv1Uxtgs4VsFnhRri1oEBg0a/view?usp=drivesdk
Drum mixing is a whole another world from song mixing and very crucial as we must process every each shell, cymbal and room mics but since our quest here is to get the fastest decent possible mix we are just gonna use more of a mix ready drum software with compression on the whole kit. As I said in my first post I'm using "Getgood Drums Modern And Massive" since it's a very nice and realistic sounding drums.
Load the vst on your DAW and choose "default kit, 100% turbo" this will help you have more mix ready sounds. Bring down the "kick sum" and "room far" mic for the kick drum. Mute "room close" mic for tighter sound.
As for cymbals mute "room close" mic
And that's it. Now let's compress it with Fabfilter pro-c
Set the style to clean and go for the hardest knee. Set the attack around 10 ms and fastest release. Pay attention to the "dry" output this will blend the compressed sound with none-compressed sound which will sounds more punchy and natural. Below you will see I've set a high pass filter on compressor which will not compress anything below 60 Hz. All these settings should give you 12 dB of gain reduction as you can see on the red bar far right. Another thing I should point out is drum MIDI velocity. To get more realistic and balanced sounds set kick velocity around 110, snare 115, Tom's 108 and cymbals 110. Use these instructions in your projects and you will be amazed by the result.
Next stop is bass processing. Happy hunting!
Amir Poorhafezi
