As producers, we sometimes spend hours balancing each percussive element, but it just isn’t working. A lot of the time, it’s because we’re overcomplicating the process of mixing drums.
In this tutorial, Fabio from Noize shares how to save hours of time and glue your drums together in two swift moves.
Getting Your Drum Mix Ready
Before you start mixing your drum bus, it’s important to pay attention to the individual elements—a little bit, at least. We don’t want to overcomplicate this step, but sound selection is really important in the production process.
After that, try a little bit of balancing, a little bit of mixing drums, and even some effects can make a difference. Once you’ve got all that in place, these are the techniques that you’re going to want to apply to get that glue.
The track we’ll be listening to today is the Avalon remix by Like Mike, Ginchy, and Alessia Labate.
Put a little Reverb Under the Drum Bus
You can hear on the track that we have a short reverb. We want to start by making sure this reverb is actually part of the drum bus. To do that, we need to route the output of the drum reverb to go to the drum bus.
We’re doing that so we can process everything together. Trust us, it’s going to make sense a little later.
Move #1: Use Tape Saturation
When we use samples from two different sample packs they don’t always go together just right. The sound design of the two loops in this song is actually pretty good, but we can always make it a bit better.
One of our favorite ways to do this is tape saturation.
The drums have been leveled so that they’re peaking at roughly the same level. Why is that important? Because we’re going to be using this tape plugin as a compressor and as a saturator at the same time.
To get the effect we want, the drums need to be leveled correctly—otherwise whatever’s higher in volume is going to trigger the saturation more. That sound could work, but it’s not what we’re going for here.
So we’re going to increase the input into the UADx Oxide Tape Recorder until we get some of the feeling. Then we can keep going for more saturation and more smoothing of transients or pull back.
Let’s pull the output down first, or else it’s going to get very loud. Then we’ll increase until we notice a tonal change.
Another thing we like about the Oxide by UADx is that the saturation adds some high frequencies and some harmonics that fill out the mid and high mid in a very pleasant and musical way.
If you don’t like that, you can change the IPS to 7.5, which gives it a darker tone.
Move #2: Fine Tune the Reverb on the Clap and Loop
Next, we’re going to set up a bus, and we’re going to open the famous Valhalla Vintage Verb, which a lot of music producers know and love.
There’s one setting that we think is the absolute best DPS plugin has to offer. If you go into Ambiences you’ll find Drum Air. Make sure that the mix is at 100% because we’ve set this up as a dry send, and we don’t want any dry signal coming through.
We love this preset because it’s a short reverb, and short reverb doesn’t take up a lot of space. It adds stereo width and a little bit of sustain.
By putting the same reverb on both these sounds—the clap and the loop—it gives us the impression that they’re both recorded in the same space. Think about all the sounds recorded from the same drum kit in one studio room. They all glue together in a very organic way, because they originate from the same source.
Remember when we put that reverb on the clap? That’s also going into the drum bus, which means we’ve set up a reverb going into a reverb. That’s something we like to do to get a more cohesive sound instead of just working with the dry signal.
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Want more tips for mixing drums? Check out these our tutorials:
How to Control Drum Peaks Without Losing Power
Your Kick Doesn’t Need More Volume. Do This Instead
Why Your Kick and Bass Sounds Weak (and How to Fix It)
And don’t forget to sign up for Boombox.io for free whenever you’re ready to start collaborating and sharing your mixes. We’ll throw in four gigs of storage at no cost.