Then, slowly decrease the threshold until only the tom opens the gate (and none of the other drum hits from the noise bleed). Increase the threshold on the gate until the tom becomes muted. Give yourself enough space to hear the entire decay of the tom. Simply insert a noise gate on the drum channel and loop a section where the tom is being hit. Toms are typically used for accents and fills in a song, so those mics only need to be audible when the toms are in use.
Noise gates eliminate noise bleed, which helps make drums sound tighter and punchier. Most people think the key to rock music is being loud, but a good drum mix benefits just as much from silence. Although some engineers like to pan their snare drums a hair to the left side to simulate the actual snare placement behind the kit. In both methods, the kick and snare mics are almost always panned dead center. The hi-hat is on the right, with the toms panned to the left from highest to lowest. In an audience perspective, the panning is reversed-as if you were watching a drum perform from the audience. The hi-hat is panned slightly to the left, with the toms panned to the right from highest to lowest. With drummer’s perspective panning, you would pan each drum channel where the actual drum would live if you were sitting behind a drum kit. There are three basic approaches to panning drums: the drummer’s perspective, audience perspective, or freestyle. Once you can clearly hear each instrument in the mix, it’s time to create a little separation using the pan knob. Finally, blend in the overhead and room mics to create the desired amount of space for your mix. Close-mic’d cymbals like the hi-hat should come next.
The toms can also be about this volume, assuming they’re used sparingly. The loudest element in the drum kit should be the snare drum, followed by the kick drum. If one instrument is too loud or too quiet, it can cause your whole mix to feel out of whack. The next step to a rocking drum mix is to simply start balancing all of your drum tracks. Simply slide the out-of-phase track over to manually line up the transient of the first downbeat with the other mics.Īfter properly lining up each of the tracks you should hear a noticeable improvement in your drum tracks. It should be easy to see which track is out of phase because the transients will be ahead or behind the rest. To correct phase issues with drum tracks, simply zoom in on the audio track in your DAW. If the meter past the center point, towards -1, your drums are out of phase. Make sure the meter on the left side hovers near +1 at the top for a well-balanced mix. To check the phase of your tracks, load LEVELS on your drum bus and jump to the Stereo Field tab. If one microphone was off by even half an inch during the recording process, that could cause phase problems which make the whole drum kit sound weak and thin. Once you have your final drum tracks prepared and ready to go, it’s time to make sure each of the tracks is in phase with each other. Only use samples to make up for what the original recording is missing. Try to retain as much of the original recording as possible.
#Rock drum plugins for garageband software
Similarly, if there are any issues with velocity, tonal consistency or just straight up bad recordings, use sample replacement software to help compensate for these issues.ĭepending on your particular sub-genre, it’s pretty common to enhance the sound of kicks, snares and even tom with sampled drums.
If there are any errors in timing, be sure to quantize them before you start mixing. Having said that, no drummer is perfect (except for Neil Peart, of course). That’s why it’s crucial that you get a solid drum recording from the beginning. There’s an old saying in the music business “Crap in, crap out.” There’s no magic spell for turning a bad drum performance into a radio-ready recording. In this blog, we’ll teach you everything you need to know about mixing big, punchy rock drums. You want the kick drum to hit you in the chest and the snare drum the smack you in the face! It may sound aggressive, but those are the keys to a killer drum mix. With the kick drum pounding on the downbeat and the snare drum thundering on the backbeat, drums act as the pulse of a song, moving and breathing to the tempo.Īnd nothing sucks the life out of a rock song faster than a weak drum mix. Drums are the heart and soul of rock music.