In order to sound like the pros, you have to get punchy, in-your-face drum peaks.
The problem is, you often end up using a lot of headroom, which means your masters end up being considerably quieter.
Good news: We’ve got Fabio from Noize to drop some knowledge and show us exactly how he controls drum peaks without losing power.
For this tutorial, we’re going to use Avalon by Mike Ginchy and Alessia Lebate. As we can see (and hear), the clap is very punchy. It’s got a sort of click on the front end, and that’s taking up a lot of headroom.
If you’re not familiar with clipping, this is an excellent example. Where a compressor brings the transient down, this clipper just cuts it off completely.
We’re using the StandardCLIP by Sir Audio Tools, which we recommend everyone pick up. It’s really cheap—like $20—and you’ll use it all the time. What’s great about this plugin is that it has a range of settings that you can flick between and then decide which one suits your sound the best.
If we take a listen, the Soft Clip Classic and Hard Clip settings on the StandardCLIP retain most of the punch. Before the clipper, this signal is coming in at minus four decibels, and after the clipper, we’re gaining back about five decibels of headroom.
Now, we are losing a bit of that punch, and we are inducing a bit of distortion. But that adds a bit of flavor to the clap, and we think it’s going to sit a lot better in the mix. We’re also going to add a bit of gain to make up for the volume that we’ve lost.
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And that’s it! With just a few adjustments you can control those drum peaks without sacrificing a ton of volume.
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