Here are 40 seconds or so of the drum tracks from a cover of “Cruel Summer” by Merlot Embargo (http://www.merlotembargo.com/) and kindly provided by David Glenn over at The Mix Academy.
On another thread I was asking about mixing/balancing just the OH tracks…
Regarding mixing OH tracks, the word “context” came up a lot. So here they are in context with the other drum tracks. Enjoy, and if interested, please post your mix AND how you got there.
Haha! Yeah buddy, your mix sounds great! I especially like the kick. Care to highlight some of your moves?
I worked on it last night, with the approach of “filling in” after the OHs, but am not ready to post after listening this AM. Especially after hearing yours! Hopefully will get some more time on tonight.
Reaper Tilt,
Elysia Tilt (filter is set to x10),
Semi parametric EQ,
Comp (doing almost nothing, just sounds good)
Ambient mics with kick drum on include:
Overheads x2 (prob panned 45% left)
Snare top? cant remember if gated.
Hi Hat (panned 100% right).
Toms were deleted except for single fill on Floor.
Yeah, the sub is only barely there, but its almost irrelevant.
And of course, the kick drum is present on all ungated tracks whichever way you mix it.
Would you mind enlightening us with the highlights of your processing to get this sound? Or maybe I should just go back and re-read your case study again.
I’ll have to get back to you with some details, as it’s late at night here in Oz, and I have to get up for work tomorrow morning early. Suffice to say that it’s all pretty standard stuff - eq, compression, gating and just a smidgeon of reverb.
I think its pretty clear you would need to slice, dice and smash this pig pretty hard to extract something useable out of it.
You may as well use samples tbh.
Some decent source material that included a pair of room mics in a decent space would probably be more educational, as you could get more variation in results.
Great bit of fun… love doing little bits like this. Tried to keep some of the open vibe of the kit. Full disclosure, I used room samples for the kick, snare and floor tom. I think in the right context this kit would actually have a really cool vibe. Does need room tracks though. Cheers!
Sure… I used all the supplied drum tracks and didn’t add any samples. I gated the kick and snare and by using (TLA inspired) “trigger” tracks in the way I described here:
For ambience I added a “room style” reverb, & a plate reverb for the snare and toms.
Overheads were just: adjust left versus right gain balance (Cakewalk Channel Tools) > reductive eq (ReaEQ) > additive eq (Waves SSL) > approx 3dB GR in compression (Waves SSL). Here’s what that looked like
I also narrowed the Overheads to about 60% of the full width. This is what it sounded like dry & solo’d:
The kick & kick sub mics were bussed to a single channel without any processing, then Gate > Reductive and additive EQ (VMR) > then 2 dB max compression (VMR):
Snare was: Both top & bottom snare mics bussed to one channel then: Gate > reductive & additive EQ (VMR) > approx 4dB max GR of comp (VMR) > Upward compression from Waves MV2 to bring up level of ghost notes:
Once again Andrew, thanks so much for sharing this stuff! This is even better than your case study because I have the tracks and can try to emulate what you’ve done. I’m up to my eyeballs in home improvements and work right now, but I’ll take some time sooner or later to go back through this. If you weren’t on the other side of the globe I’d take you out for a beer (or your beverage of choice)!
Vaughan @vtr has posted some more drum tracks for practice, so I’ll be tackling those when I have a chance too. Thanks guys!
What is interesting to me and is becoming more evident with this exercise, is that once the engineering skills are there, the “sound” becomes a matter of taste. I like seeing what others are using for plugins too. Very educational!
And wow! I was hoping you’d put one up.
