JOEY STURGIS, JOEL WANASEK, & EYAL LEVI: Heavy Drum Mixing, The Molting Technique, and Taming Cymbals

Speaker 1 (00:00):

Welcome to the Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast, brought to you by Creative Live, the world's best online classroom for creative professionals with classes on songwriting, engineering, mixing and mastering. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is also brought to you by Slate Digital, making the finest quality software and hardware products specializing in precise analog modeling of classic studio gear. The Joey Sturgis Forum podcast is also brought to you by Focal, professional, designing, developing, and manufacturing High Fidelity lab speakers and drivers for over 30 years. And now your hosts, Joey Sturgis, Joel Wanasek and Eyal

Speaker 2 (00:37):

Levi. Welcome to another episode of Tips and Tricks. Today we're going to be talking about drum mixing. I'm just really happy about drums, that's why I'm laughing.

Speaker 3 (00:45):

Drums are great. That's the only reason I always laugh when I'm mixing drums just because I hate it so much. It's the only thing I can do. No, I'm kidding.

Speaker 4 (00:54):

Drums usually make me smile when I mix them, not,

Speaker 2 (00:57):

Yeah, I actually do love drum mixing. I think it's kind of the more frustrating part of the process for me, and I've been trying to figure out why that is for a really long time, and I think it boils down to something that I kind of came across recently, which was the fact that the sounds are really intermittent and they are so short that you have to hear so much more of them in order to get them right as compared to a guitar. The guitar is kind of like a streaming set of sounds coming at you and you can kind of hear the frequency response a lot easier, but what's a drum? It's like smack and boom, it's done. The sustain is much less than the attack and I think it's just a little bit harder to get, especially in terms of equalization. What do you guys think?

Speaker 3 (01:43):

I completely agree. I also feel like it's harder to work on because it's more fatiguing at first before you get rid of all the nasty frequencies, especially in symbols. Too long on drums will start to hurt your ears. And also I feel like as badass as you think drums sound on their own. They are the foundation of everything. Without a good drum sound, you don't even have a record in my opinion, and they do need to work with everything else. So in some ways I feel like it's hard to know how awesome, awesome is at first. So I feel like there's a little bit more of a mental challenge when it comes to drums.

Speaker 4 (02:27):

I have a tendency to want to turn my drums up really loud when I'm mixing them so you can really hear the bottom and it sounds all awesome and you're like, fuck yeah, and then you turn it down and you add other instruments and you're like, really? Come on. Exactly.

Speaker 2 (02:41):

Well, I actually mix the drums at different volumes. I've found that you will react to it differently when you're hearing it either loud or quiet. So I'll do some of it loud, then I'll turn it way down and do some of it quiet, then turn it back up loud again and make some more adjustments and just kind of do a combination of that until I get it right. But I mean, I think I find it takes me a good four to five mixes before I'm happy with the drums.

Speaker 4 (03:05):

Same here. Especially that snare drum. Hey Joey.

Speaker 2 (03:08):

Yeah, I'm such a snare sound Nazi. It takes me the whole record to become completely happy with the snare sound. Even then, sometimes I'll listen to it three months later and hate the snare, so I'm just a snare Nazi when it comes to that. But

Speaker 4 (03:22):

Every time I do a record that is important to me and I'll send it around to all my buddies and be like, yo, listen to this. How does this sound? The first thing Joey always comes back with is a snare note. He's always like, dude snare not bright. Note, there's litic hit at three 12. I'm like, that's cool. How does the mix sound?

Speaker 3 (03:40):

Snares are very tough in this kind of music because this is something that I actually want to hear from you guys on because just like you said, you think the low end is right on drums for instance, and then you turn them down in the music and nothing's there. A lot of things that you do with a snare, once you have it with the music, it can just start to sound like a sneeze or just a weird pop or just like a sack of cardboard being hit with a stick, which those are actually all elements of a good snare sound, but it's very hard to know how it's going to work with everything else when you're just doing it by itself. So that said, actually first tip and trick, I want to hear from you guys. Say someone's working on a drum sound and they've got what they think is great low end in the drums, and then they turn on the music and they have to turn it down, low end is gone and it's just not quite punching through. What do you guys do in your drums to be able to get that punchy, consistent low end that just cuts through the rest of the mix the entire time, but that's not overbearing.

Speaker 4 (04:51):

Do you want to talk about kick drumm or snare drum first because I feel like kick

Speaker 3 (04:55):

Drum, kick drum snare drum Toms as well, because low end on Toms in the ring out destroy masters all the time.

Speaker 4 (05:03):

Oh man. Alright, well let's start with Yeah,

Speaker 3 (05:05):

So all of them at

Speaker 4 (05:05):

The bottom kicks because kick is what the most important part of the mix and an aggressive piece of music or anything with a distortion that's not like soft jazz. The kick drum is what really drives the energy of the song. So if you get the kick drum wrong, instrumentally, the song's going to have no balls or no energy or no push, or maybe some songs are meant to be light. You can really set the energy of the song just with that single drum, so if you don't get it right, you're screwed. I'll give you an example. There've been many times where I've mixed something and I'll get back notes from the band. This is all over the internet. It's a little bit easier when the band is sitting behind you and the band will send me a note, they'll be like, dude, that mix, you sent us garbage.

(05:46):

It's literally the worst sounding thing you've ever done. I can't believe we hired you, blah, blah, blah. And you're sitting there scratching your head. You're like, okay, well it kind of sounds like the stuff you referenced that I mix, it's right there and then it'll be something stupid. You switch the kick drum sample and you send it back to the band and they're like, dude, it's amazing now. And you're like, okay, you're like, what? All it did is change the kick. That's it. So the point is, I guess relating that back, the kick drum matters and the first decision you have to make is kick above or below the base and you have to figure out where you want it to put it in the two in relation to each other because you can't overlap them and either you have to have the kick down in the subs 50 region or you need to get the kick up in the higher region, like the 80 to a hundred ish above the base and have the low base fat drone. It just depends on what kind of mix sound you want and what kind of energy you want to convey.

Speaker 2 (06:35):

Yeah, well with drums it's all about frequency balance, and I think it's easy to get stuck into one place where you are trying to get all of your sound from one source, but in reality, a drum sound comes from many, many different sources. So it's very easy to sit there and EQ over EQ a kick all day long and forget that you also have room mics and mono rooms and overheads and all these other things that are going to transform your kick sound. Now as far as getting the low end, and I'll speak to Toms, I think it's all about the right balance of harmonics and I don't think normally a Tom's not going to get there by itself, not just throwing a mic on a tom and just leaving it there. That's not going to do it. You're going to need to, well, at least if you want to have a mix that's like mine, you need to do some harmonic saturation so that it'll actually cut through the mix. Now you can do some pointy type EQ stuff, but I don't like the results that gives you because like you said, it can destroy masters and it does it very quickly.

Speaker 4 (07:41):

You generally like the sustain of your tom to be longer or shorter because when I mix, for example, heavier music, that's faster. I hate it one a time, I was like, and it just goes forever. So I try to gate it out or weaken the fundamental frequency.

Speaker 2 (07:56):

If I'm working with a real kit and I'm not doing any sample replacement on the Toms, which is pretty much the norm for me, I do keep them pretty short, but I also have them sort of tuned kind of short as well so that I'm not dealing with it on the fundamental level, but then also I'm going in and editing where I want the Tom sustained to actually stop based on what's being played.

Speaker 3 (08:20):

I have a rule for when I clean Toms or have someone clean them for me, which unless on a ring out, I have them always do a maximum of 300 milliseconds because any longer and I feel like it just starts to get in the way of everything else. I also feel like you said a drum sound is comprised of many different factors and I feel like a lot of the cool ring on Tom's, you're going to get through overheads and rooms, but I feel like on the direct I just want it to be a punchy quick, almost like a kick drum but higher, almost like a kick

Speaker 2 (09:02):

Drum,

Speaker 3 (09:03):

Not quite,

Speaker 2 (09:04):

And what you said about the kick having to live either below or above the base. That's just another great example of EQ carving. I mean you need to create space in your mix. If you want something to live in a certain spot, the kick and the base are often fighting each other so you can't have them in the same spot.

Speaker 4 (09:23):

We should define really quick, the fastest way to do that just so people that aren't familiar with this know what we're talking about. And usually that's done with filtering.

Speaker 2 (09:31):

There's a couple of different ways and I'll explain one way that I really like to do for accomplishing that and it's just with, you could do it with a multi-band compressor and you can have the kick drum key on the base and you can create a little notch out. So what's kind of cool about that is the base can still live in the same frequency zone as the kick, but it gets out of the way when the kick comes through. I don't know if you guys have ever experimented with that.

Speaker 4 (09:59):

It's like side chain compression.

Speaker 3 (10:01):

Yeah, I do that. Yeah, side chaining a multi-band to the low end of the base. I do that quite a bit.

Speaker 2 (10:06):

Yeah, so that's the first. I would say that's a pretty advanced mixing technique that will really just take care of the problem for you. The other thing you could do, which I think I've seen you do this too, al, and your mixes is automate a whole shit ton of eq when the kick gets faster and there's more hits happening at the same time, instead of just lowering the volume, you can EQs out some of the low frequencies so they kind of get out of

Speaker 3 (10:33):

The way. Yeah, I do that one of two ways. Basically if you look at my kick track, basically I will have two EQs, I mean in addition to the regular processing that's on the kick to get the tone, I'll have two sets of filters as inserts. One will be a high pass and one will be a low pass and I'll just automate the high pass to come on in fast parts. I also have that high pass plugin turning it down by a DB so that when it kicks on, it turns down a db. It also cuts everything from depending on where, but like 50 and down or 40 and down and just depending on the speed of the part. But the other way that I do it, and I find that this is much more efficient, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that you talked about doing stuff like this as well, is say that there's four different levels at which the kicks play and maybe one of them has a different EQ setting or something. I'll actually duplicate the kick four times and I will put them each at their respective level. So one of them is full volume, one is minus one DB one's minus 1.51 is minus two one's minus 2.5, and then

Speaker 2 (11:55):

Yeah, that's actually called a malt for anyone. I might've mentioned that on various episodes.

Speaker 3 (12:01):

So I'm molt the tracks and then I cut out say that the one that's at minus two only happens during 16th note double base that it's minus two db. I cut out the kicks the rest of the time on that track so that way it saves you from a lot of automation because if you're mixing something that's got a ton of different things happening like a Black Dahlia song or something like that, and then you realize that all of the double bass parts at 16th notes are too quiet or whatever, if you have it all on one track, it's going to take a long time to turn that up. So if you have it broken up into multiple tracks, you just turn the one that's at minus two up a little and it takes care of it for the whole song.

Speaker 2 (12:52):

Yeah, totally. Yeah, that's a great way to do it. You could do that with a lot of different instruments, but I know we're kind of talking about drums. This is just kind of on that same tangent and I think this might be eyeopening for some people. This is something that I do, my drum mixes end up in a stereo stem in my session, so I have just one track, one stereo track with the whole drum mix just right there. And what I found that you can do is you can duplicate that track and you can create a couple of different EQ variations of the whole drum mix and bring them in and out of the song as you need, which is kind of another, I guess malt type trick with the whole drum mix. And I also go through and automate little bumps and dips and stuff for different types of fills or when the chorus kicks in, have the kick and the crash turned up by 1.5 DB or something like that just to give a little more energy.

Speaker 3 (13:48):

So let me ask you something. When do you have your stereo track of the drums and you do your malt when you bring in an alternate eq, is that brought in as a parallel or do you cut it out, cut mute, that section in the original track?

Speaker 2 (14:04):

Yeah, the second one that you just said is what I do.

Speaker 3 (14:08):

So kind of what I would do with kick drums

Speaker 2 (14:10):

And stuff, but with the whole drum mix and I think makes sense. There's definitely in some songs you're going to encounter, I mean not every song's the same, so there's always different material to work with and I think there are definitely situations where it's like you need to have a couple of different snare sounds or you need to have a couple of different tom sections depending on what your goals are. You might have a section in the song that's super tom heavy and all these Toms are playing and the drummers hitting them like consecutively in short bursts and it's creating a bunch of low end energy, but if you remove all that low end energy to make that part sound right now the parts where there's only one to hit sound weak, so it makes sense to have a couple of different mixes of the entire, depending on what the song's doing, you might need a part where the snare has more 200 or another part where the snare has less 200. So I think there's really no static solution. It is kind of, I mean drums are dynamic, so it's kind of makes sense that there's dynamic mixing involved as well.

Speaker 3 (15:12):

I want to actually take what you just said a step further and say that if listeners ever have this problem about to illustrate and what we're saying is a really good way deal with it. Say you're mixing and you have a breakdown section looped and that's how you're getting your tone for whatever reason, that's how you're doing it. So you have a nice fat snare that rings out forever and the kicks nice and thud, whatever. You get it sounding great and then it breaks into a blast beat next, but you weren't working on that part and then that drum sound goes over to the blast beat section and it just doesn't work because it turns into total mud. This is the solution for that. A lot of people encounter that type of problem where the drum sound great in one part and terrible in another and then just assume that their drum sound is bad, and so they go back to the drawing board, get frustrated and hold up progress when in reality their drum sound is just fine. All they needed to do is have an alternate drum sound for different types of parts.

Speaker 2 (16:25):

And it's kind of funny how that doesn't click right away, at least it didn't for me until I started doing a bunch of different records and some of the songs that I got to work on had so many different things going on, almost like different styles of music in the same song. And that's when it really clicked for me that it's like, well, if I want this part to sound like this, but this other part to sound this other way, there's just going to have to be two different mixes for the same thing. I think one of the biggest eyeopening things is the automation of a drum mix, but I did want to speak a little more too about the actual tone of the drums and what I was going to say about that was you might spend hours on EQing, this direct snare channel, but what about the overhead snare or the room snare? And I find a lot of times, I think 50 to 60% of my snare sound comes from not the direct, and I always like to reference this record because it has an interesting snare sound. It's the Shuga, I think it's called Sen, that's

Speaker 3 (17:31):

Got a really interesting mix.

Speaker 2 (17:32):

The snare is just literally a hand clap. I mean it sounds super short. There's very little decay and it's almost like they left the rooms out on purpose or something, but I always like to refer to that as like, okay, that's what a direct snare sounds like. Just basically somebody throwing a piece of wood at a piece of plastic exactly what's happening. So a lot of your direct snare sound isn't going to be anything special. It's just going to be a loud smack or a pop or whatever you're going for. The actual body and sustain comes from moving air. The air's got to go across the room and the shell has to vibrate and all that stuff has to get picked up by all those other microphones. Totally.

Speaker 4 (18:16):

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:17):

A lot of the snare is going to come from the snare sound is going to come from different microphones, not the direct.

Speaker 4 (18:22):

Yeah. Let's talk about, let's loop back to, I just thought of something in the middle of that harangue. Remember Joey, you've published about this. I think this is a really good tip for getting real Toms. If you're doing a heavy aggressive style of music to cut through the mix, if you're using them, what you can do is you can take just the transient and then have a low pass filter that automates out so you can EQ the attack of the Tom to be really bright and cut through, but then right when the sustain kicks in, so say there's a symbol ringing out over it or a symbol that's played in the middle of a tom fill, you then filter out all that high frequency information depending on the pitch of the Toms and the fill. And so it could be as low as three, 400, maybe even lower, and that allows you to get the sustain of the tom and the attack and make it sound like you have really nice, bright, punchy clean toms, but you're not bringing up all of that symbol information and other additional kit sound and bleed that's interfering. And I feel like that's a really, really good tip. Like I said, Joey, I know you've written about that before, but that's a great trick for mixing real toms and getting 'em to cut into your kiss. That's

Speaker 3 (19:30):

Funny. You guys do that too. Awesome. That's what I do as well. Well, because one of the main things that used to annoy me when I was first starting out mixing was I'd get an awesome Tom sound. I would spend a long time on it in recording and then moving over to mixing and be really focused on keeping the natural toms, and then what would happen is every single time a fill would happen, the high end on everything would change because suddenly all this high end from symbol bleed is taking over the mix. So yeah, I hate that. I hate it when I hear that in recordings and that's one of the first things when I was first starting out that made me insane and it took me a few years to figure out how to fix it, but that's actually one of the ways that I started fixing it. I've refined the methods since then, but yeah, it's cool that you guys do that.

Speaker 2 (20:27):

And there's not a lot of people that are moving the symbols away from the Toms and the snare. It's like raise them up, put 'em up hot. Oh

Speaker 3 (20:34):

Yeah, I do that too. But the thing is, there have been some cases where drummer won't comply, for instance, especially when I was first starting out.

Speaker 4 (20:46):

It helps to try and ask,

Speaker 3 (20:48):

Yeah, like I'm talking when I was first starting out and nobody listened to me. I don't really get that problem anymore when I track something, but also when you're getting tracks from somebody else, for instance, who you didn't track, but you need to mix it, it's a good way to get out. But yeah, I definitely do think that if you're tracking drums, if you're tracking drums and mixing, you can definitely save yourself a lot of heartache in the mix by getting the drummer to raise the symbols, get those fuckers out of the way. Well,

Speaker 4 (21:20):

Let's talk about compression. What do you guys got going on? How do you like to compress your drums?

Speaker 2 (21:24):

First and foremost, I don't use parallel compression. Fuck that. And the reason why I say it like that is because it seems like on the internet everyone's looking for a quick solution that fixes their problem. They're like, well, I don't really understand drum compression. I heard about this thing called parallel drum compression. It must be something really cool. Maybe that's what I need to do and that'll get me my sound. But I think that's mean. It's definitely a good trick and it's a good mixing technique and I'm sure it has its place, but if you're talking about my kind of drum mix or anything that I've worked on, it's generally does not have parallel compression. I just don't get into it.

Speaker 3 (22:04):

Lemme say one thing about parallel compression before we move on. In the past couple of years I have experimented with it and have had some great results with it, but also it hasn't been this night and day thing. People think on the forums. I did not grow up on parallel compression though, because earlier versions of pro tools were horrible when it came to doing parallel tracks for daily compensation reasons and phase would get all messed up and it was almost impossible. So on a lot of older versions of pro tools, you had to not do that kind of stuff. And so it never became part of my workflow until pro tools got better. And I do think that parallel compression is cool, but I also think that it's only cool if you already have a good drama sound and are looking for a little extra something here or there. It could be an option, might not be an option, but it's not something that's integral to a great drum sound.

Speaker 4 (23:06):

I had a big phase where I was, there was always a pair of parallel blue stripes on my drum bus and I mean I just smashed into 'em. I'm talking the hardware, not the plugin because the waves emulations and stuff, they don't react like the actual hardware does, and I've got some of those, oh God, what is the name of the company that made the reissue clones that are pretty cool? Well, I can't remember, but they're really good sounding compressors and they're reasonably affordable and they have a cool movement on drums and I would smash into them really hard and then sometimes bring the parallel mix almost up as loud as the original. The problem is if you have a beat that's like say like an Andrew WK where it's like a four on the floor where you have double bass on the snare transient and the kick transient and they hit at the same time, what happens is it'll usually take the grater of those, which is usually your kick, and you can find you're ducking your snare, so sometimes it would get a really bombastic awesome smashing drum sound, and then what would happen is you get to a part where there's a beat like that and you'd be like, what happened to the snare drum?

(24:07):

Why is my snare sound really weak at the chorus in this part? And so I kind of stopped using it. I started getting drum sounds that were equally as bombastic just with regular bus compression and individual track compression. But I mean, I've had phases with it. Sometimes it's cool, sometimes it isn't cool. You just got to experiment,

Speaker 3 (24:25):

But

Speaker 4 (24:25):

It isn't like the be all end all.

Speaker 3 (24:27):

No, not at all. Okay. Now Joey proceeds, sorry, just wanted to get that out of the way.

Speaker 2 (24:31):

All good. I was just going to say I have very many interesting layers of compression going on. I am compressing my kicks in my snares, but I'll tell you it's very, very light, just enough to give it kind of that little punchy sound, but not too crazy. I kind of subscribe to the way that Chris Lord algae treats drum compression, which I've heard is very lightly, not a whole ton

Speaker 4 (24:55):

Low ratios, but high amounts of input gain. I was watching a video with, it's interesting because him and I came to the same stressor settings on snare. Coincidentally, I was watching a video of Green Day and all of a sudden I was listening to the mix and I'm like, oh, I can see the stressors lighten up every time the snare hits and it looks like a direct. And then I kind of paused it, zoomed in on the settings and lo and behold, it was the same attack and release and input. So sometimes it'll take a two to one ratio. For example, this is my thing is I like a stressor and I like that input knob to 10, which is like 12, 14, 16 DB of game reduction, but you're doing it at two to one ratio, so it's not like you're over compressing the snare, you're just really digging into it and bringing up a lot of the body and fattening it and making it more apparent without totally squashing it and limiting it to death.

Speaker 2 (25:42):

Yeah, I'll do compression on my directs and sometimes a little bit of compression on, well, actually a lot of compression on my drum rooms for sure. A little bit of compression on the overheads, and then I'll sometimes also compress the shells together just a tiny bit, and then I'll also compress the entire drum mix together so there's different layers of compression happening.

Speaker 4 (26:04):

I think that's a really good point too, is that a lot of drum sounds that you hear on big records are having lower ratios. Well, I can't speak for everybody, but there's a lot of stage compression where it's because it's multiplicative where

(26:20):

You multiply it together. So if you have a two to one and a four to one, well then you multiply the two together, you don't add them, so it can really stack up into just infinity to one pretty quick. So you hear a lot of low ratio built up compression across a lot of different parts in the path, like two bus, drum, bus, individual, everything together, and it's not so much you're just smashing one individual piece, and that's usually how you hear a lot of really aggressive modern sounds. It's a lot of baby steps equaling a much bigger picture.

Speaker 3 (26:50):

One synergy here, two DB there, two DB there. Yeah, I've noticed when I'm going for compression on drums, usually it can get a really good gentle but punchy setting very quickly, and I've noticed that if I spend too much longer on it and try to get more extreme, it's just generally downhill from there. Joey, did you tell me once that you liked the SSL EQ compressor on its channel strip? The waves channel strip?

Speaker 2 (27:22):

Yeah, I think it's called the G channel or the ECH channel. I like that too. Me too. Yeah, I use that pretty much on every drum mix, kind of just my go-to for the general EQ and compression per drum, but I do have stacked stuff on top of that. I generally won't stack the compression though. I'll just use the compressor built into there. Or if I want to go a little more aggressive, I'll just use a different compressor and I just won't engage that one at all. But generally I like to use that one the most.

Speaker 3 (27:52):

What's your favorite aggressive compressor for drums?

Speaker 2 (27:56):

I really like Kramer Pie. That thing sounds cool. I don't really know why or I don't know much about it. It's like

Speaker 4 (28:05):

It's a different type of pulse with modulation compression versus like,

Speaker 2 (28:09):

Okay, yeah, it just came with one of my packs. I bought the horizon bundle and it just came with it and I just ended up looking at it one day and messing around with it and I was like, oh, wow, this sounds really cool. And I just started using it, so I never really did any research on why it's a different type of compressor or anything.

Speaker 3 (28:27):

So let's talk compression on Toms real quick. A different people feel different way. Some people say absolutely never. Some people say you're nuts. I personally feel like very light is the way to go if you're going to go. What do you guys think?

Speaker 2 (28:42):

I don't have any compression on my Toms generally, but they do end up getting compressed when they go through either the shell group or the drug group. So one way or another they get compressed, but I'm definitely not compressing them individually. That's what I mean though.

Speaker 4 (28:59):

I love it. I don't do it hard on the individual though. I do it a lot in parallel, but another substitute for that because that can be a can of worms. I mean, usually if I'm mixing a sample and then I'm going to use it and it's going to be pre-baked, do it like that. Sometimes when you have it on a group, it can cause more problems than it solves. But the other way I kind of gotten around that is I like Joey's clipper plugin a lot on Toms. I feel like that it

Speaker 3 (29:23):

Really is a good plugin.

Speaker 4 (29:24):

It really helps him cut and just get in your face without having to compress them. And I've been using that a lot more than I have been compressing Toms. But I do love compression on Toms and I like to be aggressive with it sometimes, but it depends what kind of style of music, but I feel like you can kind of get that sort of attitude with clipping your Toms.

Speaker 3 (29:41):

Well, I feel like compression on Toms sometimes is the reason that they help distort a final master that I feel like over compressing the individual Toms causes you to need to turn them up louder in the mix, which I feel like is where a lot of the problems come from. Whereas having a pier transient above the music, I feel like the bus compressor will treat that better and will help bring the Toms out more that way rather than having them super compressed. I feel like lots of times when people think they've got a good Tom sound that's super compressed and then they don't understand why it's destroying the mix, I think it's just better off that they back off that compression and not use it all on Toms. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (30:34):

Totally. It's easy to get in trouble with it. You got to be careful.

Speaker 3 (30:37):

Yeah, I think it's interesting. I feel like a lot of these tricks that people want to use on drums are very easy to get in trouble with. And from reading online, when someone says they really like the sound of a compressor, you don't know exactly what they mean by that. So you got a lot of noobs that get on there and go for way too much gain reduction ratios that are way too high, and they don't understand that people like these tools as part of a bigger picture. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (31:11):

It's

Speaker 3 (31:11):

A great point. So just think it's important to realize that EQ is the same way.

Speaker 2 (31:15):

Yeah, I think there are some compressors that definitely have some interesting tonal qualities or some interesting, maybe even, I want to say harmonic saturation happening

Speaker 3 (31:27):

Somewhere

Speaker 2 (31:27):

In there, but those are the kinds of things. It's either that or how it interacts with dynamics, and those are kind of the only two things that really determine the sound of a compressor. So I think some people might say, I like the sound of this compressor, but in reality they just like the way that it functions.

Speaker 3 (31:48):

I agree with that. On the topic of EQing drums, let's talk about Toms for instance, the one drum where I need to do the most EQ out of any of 'em to get a tom to sound the way it needs to sound. In general. What do you guys think?

Speaker 2 (32:08):

Did you say floor Tom? No, just

Speaker 3 (32:10):

Toms in general.

Speaker 2 (32:11):

Oh, I find

Speaker 3 (32:12):

That that's out of all the drums. That's the one that has to undergo the biggest transformation,

Speaker 2 (32:18):

And it has a lot to do with the fact that there is a note coming out of it, and there's definitely a note coming out of every drum. But for the kick drum, the note is so low that it kind of goes under the radar. I mean, you can get away with murder there as long as it's not tuned too high, it kind of doesn't matter. It's just a low end hit. The snare is going to have a note, but it's less apparent because there's muffling or the actual snares on the bottom and stuff kind of masks what the note is. Unless you have a really ringy snare, the Toms are what's really going to sing out a note every time you hit it, there's this note that's coming out, and you do have to realize that different notes come with different frequencies. So your hi Tom is going to be treated completely differently than your low to, because there's different frequencies coming out of it.

(33:11):

There's different notes coming out, so you have to EQ it differently. One of the tricks that I've come up with, and I don't know if this is a popular thing or just something my mind wandered into, but I will remove the other Tom notes from the Toms. So with the high Tom, I'm removing the middle Tom and the floor Tom notes from the high Tom, even if they're not really there, I'm still carving out space in the frequencies to make room for those notes, and then I just carry that on to each one. So like the middle Tom, remove the notes of the high and the low and the low Tom remove the notes of the high and the mid. You guys ever done that? The keys of

Speaker 4 (33:51):

The piano

Speaker 3 (33:52):

Approach? As a matter of fact, I have done that because I deal with a lot of really fast drummers who are all over the place, and I found that that was one of the cool things to do that would help the Toms stand out on their own rather than just sound like old school death metal. Toms, I like to be able to hear every single hit individually. So I find that that helps a lot. That's a great trick.

Speaker 4 (34:25):

Old school death metal, Toms, I like the way that sounds. I've had so many interesting experiences with those growing up.

Speaker 3 (34:33):

Yeah, they're funny. Alright, so you do complimentary EQ on every Tom, anything else you do?

Speaker 2 (34:39):

It just creates clarity I find, and I think the more clarity you can create, the easier your mix will be. I mean, you'll be able to do Tom rides if you get it clear enough, you'll be able to actually ride the Toms, which is I think something that's kind of rare. You are probably spending most of your time fighting just to get them audible in the mix, especially if it's a loud mix. I'm doing that. I'm also clipping my Toms and I do, like I said earlier, I do some harmonic saturation to get those notes to actually pop through. Do you guys do any clipping?

Speaker 4 (35:10):

Yes, absolutely. It's good. I mean, clipping in a really heavy dense mix really helps. I mean, it kind of goes back to what we were saying about compression generally. I don't EQ Toms too much though. I mean, if you're doing metal for me it starts off if you don't have good Toms recorded where you can use the natural stuff and they sound like dog crap, you got to have a really nice set of go-to Tom samples. And I've got a few sets that I just, that's it every single time. For example, I love Drum forge, Tom Set six. I mean, that's automatically one of my defaults whenever I need something because I know it's going to cut because I designed it that way. And having something that you know is going to work 90% of the time, and if you're in a time crunch, definitely can suffice for a very, very lackluster performance of recording of Tom. So generally when I get a decent sample, and if I'm mixing times that way, I usually don't need a ton of eq, but if I'm using a lot of natural sounds and they were recorded mediocre or less than stellar, but still usable, then I'm with you guys. I mean, I'll eq the absolute hell out of them until they sound awesome.

Speaker 3 (36:17):

Well, I mean, I guess, and you had to do that with your Tom samples when you were preparing them too, right?

Speaker 4 (36:22):

Yeah, they didn't need a ton. I mean, I don't know, it's weird. I have mixed feelings. It's kind of like, I'll explain it like this. When you're mixing guitars, sometimes you start notching out all these little frequencies and moving around phase in the high end, trying to get it smooth on the ear, but bright enough to sit in the track without anything pissing you off. And then all of a sudden you've got six EQs open and you're like, man, this sounds like shit. And you take 'em all off and you're like, oh, okay. And then you start over and then you maybe make one or two EQ cuts and then one or two fine ones, and you've already got it sounding way better. Sometimes I feel like it's that where you can chase the dragon down the hole a lot with the Toms and you make 'em too weak or too brittle and thin or too clean, and sometimes you take that shit off and then just use broad stroke eq, like a 0.2 Q with bell up in the top end and then a mid cut and then maybe a bottom booster on the fundamental.

(37:11):

And sometimes that's all it needs. It doesn't need a crazy eq, so you got to experiment with both. It's easy to chase the rabbit. It really, really, really is. But you got to resist the urge sometimes and see what you can get with just broad strokes. Well,

Speaker 3 (37:23):

If it's well recorded, you can definitely, definitely go a lot more easy on the queue. Before we wrap up, let's talk real quick about symbols and rooms. Just that's the one thing we didn't really touch on.

Speaker 2 (37:38):

For me, the first thing I do is I'll keep my overheads in my rooms muted or turned all the way down, and I'll work on the directs and stuff for a bit, and then I'll bring those in and when I bring them in, I'm paying attention to what is changing frequency wise, what kind of notes are popping into the mix. And that's generally the biggest problem that you have with rooms is the actual frequency response to the room is messed up because a lot of places aren't treated properly, or B, if it is treated properly, then you're also dealing with the ring that I like to remove from most of the drums that I work with. There's always some kind of ringing frequency somewhere that I don't want there. So that's the first thing that I'll attack is try to get that out. And you generally will hear it right off the bat as soon as you bring it in, it pops out.

(38:35):

At least for me it does. And that's when I go in and get that taken care of. And I just use, there's mathematics to it too. So if you have a ringing note that's happening at let's say 423 hertz, if you multiply that by two, that's where the next octave of that same note is going to happen. So you check that frequency zone and see if there's anything happening there. And if there is, you can kind of duck it out and this is all super narrow adjustments, then I'll just make a decision. Do I want brighter rooms or do I want darker rooms? And from there maybe go with a high shelf or go with something else. And for my rooms in general, I'm very, very aggressive with them. I'll definitely have two mics that are stereo and pretty wide and they get compressed but not crazy. And then I'll have another pair of mics that just get fucking slammed to hell, like the craziest compression that you could ever think of, all buttons in on 1176 with the input turned all the way up to zero.

Speaker 3 (39:44):

Yeah, that's actually kind of fun. The

Speaker 4 (39:46):

Only setting.

Speaker 3 (39:48):

So here's a question that we get asked a lot. So I want to know what you guys do about this. How do you get that sheen on your symbols without having them sound painful?

Speaker 4 (40:00):

Oh my god. A lot of work. Yeah,

Speaker 3 (40:03):

Definitely. I

Speaker 2 (40:05):

Think there's one quick trick that you can do to get that to happen, and it's to notice there's kind of three problem areas that I find in almost every symbol track that I've ever come across in my life. You've got the 2K, the 4K, and the eight K, or it's maybe the 4K, the eight K, and the 10 K. That area of frequencies is just so harsh for symbols most of the time depends on the microphones and the symbols obviously. But I find if you just do some work in that area, do some reduction, you can get a nice clean sound and also boosting stuff above 14 k will give you that kind of the shimmer and the sheen that's more pleasant than the nasty stuff that you experience around the eight K. Also, listening for ringing frequencies is a big one too. Totally.

Speaker 4 (41:00):

I mean, I feel like that's half the battle sometimes when you're doing symbols because there's a lot of beautiful sheen and clean stuff in there. But what happens is all that stuff gets masked by high frequencies. So if there's too much bullshit ringing, say at 4K and you do a little bit of a notch, what's going to happen is it'll reveal the beauty around it. And you got to find that stuff that's distracting from a good symbol sound where the symbol sounds great and get it out of there

Speaker 3 (41:28):

Without making it sound dull.

Speaker 2 (41:30):

And this is just another short tip because I pretty much do this on every overhead that I ever work with because I don't really like my snare to be very prominent in my overheads. And what I've always noticed is the snare sticks out much louder than the symbols do. So usually the very first thing I put on the overhead track is an L two, which is famously known as the snare destroyer. You crank that down to where it starts to meet, where the symbols touch like the maximum peak level of the symbols, but then your snare hits shoot over that and it pumps them down and puts those snare hits back level with the symbols. And then I compress after that so that my compressor's reacting to the symbols and not to the snare. I think if you didn't do that, your compressor would be behaving all crazy and it wouldn't be reacting to the symbol performance. It'd be reacting more to the snare performance. So I just wanted to throw that tip out there for anyone who's having trouble trying to compress their symbols properly, try a limiter in front of your compressor so that it will cut the snare hits off and get those out of the way. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:45):

Well, cool. I think that about wraps up this episode of Tips and Tricks,

Speaker 2 (42:51):

And if you guys have more questions about drum mixing, please visit the, we have a private producer's club if you're a producer subscriber, and we also have the subscribers lounge where you're welcome to discuss that as well.

Speaker 3 (43:07):

These groups are on Facebook for anyone that

Speaker 2 (43:09):

Doesn't know, on Facebook. And yeah, if you have more questions, just feel free to ask and we will revisit this topic I'm sure, because drum mixing is quite the beast.

Speaker 3 (43:19):

Yeah, it never goes out of style. Totally. Thanks guys.

Speaker 1 (43:23):

Yep. Thanks for listening. Thank you. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is brought to you by Creative Live, the world's best online classroom for creative professionals with classes on songwriting, engineering, mixing, and mastering. Go to creative live.com/audio to start learning now. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is also brought to you by Slate Digital, making the finest quality software and hardware products specializing in precise analog modeling of classic studio gear. Go to www.slatedigital.com to revolutionize your mix. The Unstoppable Recording Machine Podcast is also brought to you by Focal Professional, designing, developing and manufacturing high fidelity lab speakers and drivers for over 30 years. Go to focal professional.com to find out more. To ask us questions, suggest topics and interact. Visit urm academy.com and subscribe today.