from this months nail the mix. check this kick and snare snippet
the snare has a ton of cymbal bleed so i am trying a reverse phase trick to attenuate the bleed.
So this is kick mics/sample along with snare mics/samples…no room or OH mics. One of the snare sample has some room sound but I have it fairly low
hows this sound so far??
What I’m curious about is this: is it possible to say anything about this without the context of the rest of the song? I don’t really like the sound of the snare, but I don’t know how it’s supposed to sound, or what the song sounds like, so I don’t know if that matters.
I get what you’re trying to do, from the last discussion where you were encouraged to start really small and build your way up. I’m just not sure how that’s supposed to work. How does it sound to you? Is there something you’d like it to sound like but you’re not sure how to get there?
Personally, I’ve never really been that bothered by bleed from other instruments (cymbals in this case). As a package, it all comes together in the end and can be used to your advantage. If the bleed just sounds awful though, I suppose I’d just find a good sample to replace with.
As you have it, the snare has a decent thwack to it, but as @Cristina mentioned, it’d be good to hear it in context.
I’ll check it out as you’re sharing more!
Since the kick and snare a huge part of the foundation of the mix I think its possible to tell him if there are any real bad problems with it that could kill him later on. I suspect you might need more 1k in the kick, but the bottom sounds solid and its adequately bright. Good to note that it has a nice full body in the 120 range. The hats, just from what I’m hearing in the bleed don’t seen to have any sibilance problems that the snare will have to compete with later (which is another thing you look for right away in the bleed). This is a heads up that a gate or a transient designer may have to taper off sustain on the snare.
We don’t know enough yet to make an informed decision, but that snare may be lacking a little punch from the top mic. This might be a candidate for Jon Johns 1176 or Distressor to add by reducing the release time and lengthen the attack time in hopes that it will bring out the snappy punch from the direct contact of the stick hitting the skin. I’m also noting that the body of the snare is big, but may need some management in the 200 and 800 range to glue it into whatever else is coming around.
A multiband compressor may be needed to get kick in the room mic to not overwhelm the low end spectrum with sub bass. It sort of lets us assess the primary building blocks of the source so we can know what he has to work with in the mix.
I might get the Bomber ready to go on that bottom snare mic. Turn it left of 12:00 and it accents transients. Turn it right and it tightens and focuses sustain. I’d put it on there but leave it disabled.
That is a LOT of bleed. It doesn’t necessarily hurt, but that much can overwhelm the HiHat direct mic if not addressed in the early stages of the drum structure. I would tune these before sending them into the drum Jon, I wouldn’t start with drum bus compression and mix them into the bus comp.
He needs to be very very careful to not let that thwack get pummeled into a pancake with layers of compression.
Lets head the overheads next. Add a bass, one rhythm guitar and lead vocal only for some context. 
[quote=“Jonathan, post:4, topic:3128, full:true”]
That is a LOT of bleed.[/quote]
shoot, you aint heard nothing yet. Like I said, you are hearing the bleed AFTER I did the reverse phase trick to REDUCE bleed lol
here is the “trick” btw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR3mKXORiiw&feature=youtu.be
and it only gets worse. The “hi hat” mic has a ton of snare so to me its just another OH or even room mic.
to my ear, both the OH and room mics sound incredibly boxy so that is one reason why I am working hard trying to get the snare to sound half decent first
to complicate it further, there are a lot of prerecorded loops in the song with percussion and again some of them sound sort of boxy to my ear. or at least they dont really sound that much like a drum set should sound. Then you have about a million various guitar parts, strings, synth pads etc. Yet of course somehow in the final mix they managed to get the drums to cut thru lol
here is the final mix on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbZiSU2YoUI
[quote=Jonathan]
We don’t know enough yet to make an informed decision, but that snare may be lacking a little punch from the top mic. This might be a candidate for Jon Johns 1176 or Distressor to add by reducing the release time and lengthen the attack time in hopes that it will bring out the snappy punch from the direct contact of the stick hitting the skin. I’m also noting that the body of the snare is big, but may need some management in the 200 and 800 range to glue it into whatever else is coming around.[/quote]
like I said, this snippet was top and bottom snare mics, plus a top sample plus a “room” snare sample. IIRC the only one I compressed was the main top mic and I used the Slate “Modern” (FG116 Blue) with slowest attack, fastest release, hitting about 5-6db GR…mix set to about 85% wet.
I also tried the 401 Red back and forth but in the end thought the blue was better
the rev phase trick does take away a bit of the top smack off of the snare as it tries to cut out the cymbal bleed…so this is a best compromise as i see it so far
[quote=Jonathan] I suspect you might need more 1k in the kick, but the bottom sounds solid and its adequately bright. Good to note that it has a nice full body in the 120 range.{/quote]
maybe my ear is getting a tiny bit better because I figured if anything the kick may still need some more smack. I am not super familiar with the 1k range on kick…what are we looking for there?
I forget the exact processing I did on kick. Again there are mics and samples involved. I do know that on my kick bus I used a Waves puigtech EQP 1A…which is pretty confusing lol. I think I boosted around 60hz IIRC. So I just went by ear on that and then added a pretty decent high shelf boost on ReaEQ to get things to where they currently are
well look at it this way, would you want to spend a week on a mix and then be told the drums have massive fundamental flaws??
There ya go lol.
why build to the top floor only to be told the foundation was crooked?
Well I’m interested to see how this turns out. With a building, you can’t always go back and change the foundation once you’ve built the top floors. But with mixing, you can easily go back and tweak the drums once you’ve mixed the rest of the song. I just think that mixing is about how everything works with everything else. Not just how they work in isolation. I would believe that once you’ve done enough mixes you can develop a strategy and recognize issues that you need to take care of early on, though.
I watched this great mixing tutorial on Lynda.com by Bobby Owsinski a while back. Do you have access to Lynda.com? Sometimes you might have access through your local library, if you’re not sure. I’ll post some of the notes I took from the course, that have to do with mixing the drums from the kick:
Be careful with the bottom of the kick drum, if you can’t really hear bass. (Maybe try your 2.1 speakers for that.)
Basically pick the part of the drum kit that you want to stand out the most, and start mixing with that part.
Building your mix from the kick
○ Solo the drums
○ Start with all of your drum tracks at silent, and bring them in one at a time.
○ Bring the Kick In in first, so that it reads about -10db on the matser meter.
○ Then bring the Kick Out in, just enough that you can barely hear it.
○ Bring in the snare top.
○ Then the snare bottom, enough that you can barely hear it.
○ Bring up the OH until you can start to hear the cymbal crashes clearly.
○ Bring the toms up. This will change the sound of the whole kit, which is okay.
---- Find a good tom fill in the song to balance the toms with each other and the other drums.
○ You can probably already hear the hi hat–bring it up just enough for a bit more definition.
○ Bring in the room mic for a bit of added ambience and glue. Bring it up enough to make the drums sound better, but not too much.
In this tutorial he did the volume for everything first then the panning. Then he did compression, then noise gates/de-essing, then EQ. I can think of another tutorial (from Recording Revolution) that says to start with the faders, too. It sounds like you’re starting this mix with the kick and snare, using plugins to get them to sound just how you would like. Is that advisable? I feel like maybe the foundation is the levels as a whole, rather than the kick and the snare by themselves. Are you going based off a different sort of method? I’d be interested in another comprehensive mixing tutorial one of these days.
well one thing about music…there are no rules. period. everyone does things in their own way. Im still working out my own workflow as I learn
AFAIk though most people start with drums. Now that much being said, I would think there would be 2 main paths from that point. One can either start with a) kick or snare OR b) maybe some people actually start with room mics to try to get an overall sound. Just from what ive seen of other people including pros, most start with either kick or snare
of course there is “prep” work first and a lot of top mixers have assistants that prepare the mix for them. for instance going thru and setting all of the tracks to a certain level while also setting the faders to 0 etc