How to mix drums
How to mix drums
7 Tips for Mixing Drums
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We get a lot of questions about how to mix drums—and that’s understandable. Drums are a vital element in music. They get people moving and they provide a pulse that keeps songs alive. Well, hopefully they do. If they sound weak, the drums might do nothing more than cause disappointment and even death to your production.
In this tutorial, I’ll be sharing mixing tips to get a full, clean drum mix in your production. We’ll be using iZotope Neutron mixing plug-in for the bulk of the processing here.
Should you mix drums first?
Lots of engineers prefer to begin their mix with the drums—some starting with the granularity of the kick and building out from there. Others have different methods, including mixing with all the instruments all the time; getting the vocal first and placing it against bass, kick drum, and snare; and many more.
Mixing is such a personalized art. There is no “one size fits all” answer to this, so I would not presume to prescribe.
I work on gain staging first, then assemble a kind of overall static mix—either one that matches the rough mix, or one that represents my choices, depending on what the producer/artist wants.
Sometimes the music beckons me to start mixing from the overheads first, back to the kick drum. Other times, I start with the bass and kick together. It depends.
You’ll find your own way, but I strongly suggest the static mix. It makes your life so much simpler, especially when it comes to drums.
What effects should you put on drums?
EQ, compression, saturation, and transient shaping are common effects we use on drums. Depending on the sound and the recording, gating may be necessary. For atmosphere, we might use convolution or algorithmic reverb, and delay is often applied.
Flanging, phasing, and other modulations don’t usually occur unless one has very specific motives—or unless one wants to enhance the reverberation/delay in a specific manner.
Now, let’s move into techniques for mixing drums with Neutron. None of these tips are time-consuming, but all can give you big sonic rewards.
1. Visualize your drum sound with panning
Panning your drums is an important consideration, and I like to tackle it early. Two things come into play when thinking about how to pan drums:
What do I want to happen in the arrangement?
What do the recordings allow me to achieve?
The arrangement has a huge influence on how to pan drums. In many rock mixes, the drums might not be as wide as you’d think, since the guitars are handling the hard left/hard right positions. On other mixes, the drums are the widest thing going, while the instruments occupy a narrower space. These decisions are aesthetic.
But the recording itself plays a huge part. Drums are usually captured with multiple mics. If the phase relationships aren’t great to begin with, no amount of panning, balancing, EQ, or phase trickery is going to give me complete freedom. I’ll have to match the kick, snare, hat and tom mics to the overheads as best I can—and that’s the image I’m stuck with.
Some engineers are so good at recording drums that you can pan their recordings without restraint. Steven Wright (Lonely Islands, Super City) is one such engineer: I’ve been lucky to work with his drum recordings; they are so well done that I can forget about any limitations and concentrate solely on the arrangement.
This, sadly, is the exception. Most drums have a ceiling when it comes to what you can get away with.
Once you explore these considerations, you can use your DAW’s pan pots to get where you want to go, or you can use a tool like iZotope’s Visual Mixer, which comes with Neutron.
Visual Mixer offers a single control to simultaneously adjust level and panning of multiple instruments at once in a single window. Feast your eyes upon the next image, which shows the Visual Mixer on the drums.
Here’s one method of panning you can try. Start by listening to your overheads, with all the other tracks dragging the bottom (i.e., muted). A lot of the time, if you’re working with two mono overheads, you’ll start by pushing them all the way right and all the way left. Listen to the stereo image. Is your snare in the center? If not, here’s a tip on how to get it there: Try moving one of the overheads in to make the snare more centered. You’ll notice the kick will be off-centered then; don’t worry about that for now, the actual kick drum will fix that, or a high-shelf on the overheads—attenuating them—should help as well.
Next, bring up your snare, your kick, your hat, your room mics, and your toms. Try to match the panning with the overheads.
2. Give your drums shells a head start with Track Enhance
Neutron’s assistive technology recently made a fascinating leap forward. Now, it relies more on the Sculptor module to guide your sounds into their proper shape. Instead of a static preset, you get the Assistant View, which lets you tweak things with macro controls.
This Assistant View works especially well on drum shells.
Observe what happens when I use it on the kick drum. We go from this:
Mixing Drums: How To Get a Powerful Drum Sound in 7 Steps
Mixing drums is one of the most satisfying parts of music production.
Drums propel the rhythmic action of a song and getting them right is a great feeling. But mixing a good drum sound can be hard when you’re just getting started
Even so, you can get results if you know how to apply a few key techniques.
In this article I’ll show you how to get a powerful and punchy drum mix in 7 steps.
Let’s get started.
1. Create busses to organize your tracks
The first step to mixing drums successfully is to set up your tracks right.
That means creating busses to organize the tracks and process them in the right places.
To start you’ll need a main stereo bus for the entire drum mix.
The first step to mixing drums successfully is to set up your tracks right.
With the output of your individual mics routed to this aux channel you’ll be able to apply processing to the entire drum sound and adjust it’s overall level.
You should also create mono busses for any drums that have been mic’d with multiple microphones, like if you used a snare top and bottom mic.
Set these busses to output to the main drum bus as well.
Finally, you should create a separate bus for the left and right overheads so you can adjust them independently.
Here’s a diagram of drum tracks properly bussed out for mixing.
2. Use expansion for extra punch
When most engineers record drums, they place microphones in the room, over the drummer’s head and up close on each individual element of the kit.
The close mics are how you turn up specific sounds like the kick and snare to work best in the mix.
But no matter how well they’re placed, drum close mics will capture some bleed from the other sounds in the kit.
The close mics are how you turn up specific sounds like the kick and snare to work best in the mix.
If the bleed is too loud, you won’t be able to push the close mics up in the mix without adding distracting background spill from the cymbals.
To reduce it you can use expansion.
An expander is like a compressor in reverse—it reduces the level of the signal when it drops below the threshold instead of when it goes above.
You might know about expanders if you’ve ever used a noise gate. Many engineers use gates on drums, but they can make the drums sound choked and unnatural.
In most cases you don’t need to completely remove the background noise—just decrease it enough so that it’s not interfering with your mix.
Here’s a nice explanation of how you can use expansion to clean up drum close mics.
Try expansion on your close mics if you need cleaner, punchier sound from your kick, snare or toms.
3. Compress in parallel to add weight
Compression is important for mixing drums, but it can be easy to go too far.
Heavy compression can sound great when the drums are solo’d, but it can make them disappear in a full mix.
So how do you get the sonic benefits without losing the punch? Compressing in parallel is your best option.
To do it you’ll need a compressor plugin with a mix knob or a separate send and aux return channel for your compression sound.
With the compressor set up in parallel you can use an aggressive setting that adds weight and power to the sound and blend the natural transients back in.
Here’s an overview on parallel compression to get you started:
4. Add reverb to create ambience and depth
Drums are acoustic instruments that you normally hear in a reverberant space. That means they need some ambience to sound natural and three dimensional.
Many engineers rely on microphones placed at a distance to create these qualities. But if you don’t have those, reverb plugins can work just as well.
Drums are acoustic instruments that you normally hear in a reverberant space. That means they need some ambience to sound natural and three dimensional.
You’ll have to create another bus to send the drum tracks to a reverb plugin. To make it convincing you need to be careful with the blend of sources you send.
In the past it was common to send only the close mics to the reverb, but this can result in a slightly strange ambience texture.
With expansion on these mics the effect is even more pronounced—it’s a specific sound that was popular in the production style of the 80s.
If you don’t have any room mics, I recommend adding subtle reverb to the overheads instead of only to the close mics.
5. Use saturation to stand out in the mix
So far the drums are sounding nice and clear with solid power and convincing ambience.
But even then you might struggle to push them forward in the mix. One way to put your drums right up front is with harmonic saturation.
This is the subtle distortion that adds complex harmonics to your sound and makes it more present in the mix.
Saturation is the subtle distortion that adds complex harmonics to your sound and makes it more present in the mix.
Most plugins that create this type of distortion are based on analog hardware. Old electronic components like tubes, transformers and magnetic tape are famous for their pleasing sound.
Engineers used these processors to enhance their mixes with saturation.
Here’s a nice clear example of how a tape machine plugin can push the midrange and add pleasing saturation to the sound.
6. Blend in samples for texture
The DAW era gave engineers access to many new tools to enhance their mixes.
It’s common in many genres to replace individual hits in the drum mics with samples to change their sound.
If you’ve followed this guide and your drums still don’t have enough impact, you might consider this approach to help fix it.
To trigger samples with your drum mics you’ll need a sample replacement plugin.
These plugins detect the transient of the incoming audio and play a sample back when the level hits a certain threshold.
Replacing every single hit in your drum mics is pretty extreme, but subtly blending in samples with your real drums is a great way to reinforce them.
Here’s an easy way to trigger samples with your drum mics using built-in tools in Logic Pro X.
7. EQ your drums to match the rest of the mix
You might be surprised that I’ve left EQ for last in this tutorial.
But if you can get your drum mix sounding good using the techniques in the previous steps you might not have to do much EQ at all.
Besides, every mix is different and it’s hard to give advice about which specific frequencies you need to address in yours.
Despite that there are some common places to add EQ while mixing drums:
A Powerful Guide to Mixing Killer Drums in 6 Simple Steps
Download Your Free Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Mixing Drums and Beats
Mixing drums correctly is one of the most important elements of creating a solid foundation in your mix.
A weak drum sound kills the rest of the mix and makes everything else suffer. Therefore, mixing drums is your number one priority for laying that solid foundation to your tracks, guaranteeing you a solid rhythm section.
Drums can be one of the most problematic instruments to get right in a mix.
If you did an excellent job recording the drum kit, then mixing your drums can only be a pleasurable experience.
Let’s go through the drums one by one and give you some simple and practical tips you can use right away.
1. Kick Drum Sound
Mixing drums starts with the foundation of the kick drum. The sound of the kick drum, along with the snare will be the defining factors of your drum sound. If you leave the kick drum sounding wrong, the whole foundation of the song will lose its footing. The kick drum needs to be tight and punchy, with enough low end to fill up the bass range and enough mids to cut through the mix.
It’s important to emphasize the low end of the kick with EQ. If you feel there isn’t enough bass to your kick drum, a low shelving boost around 80 – 100 Hz normally does the trick.
A boomy kick drum can also cloud up the clarity of your kick drum sound, so it’s usually a good idea to cut around 200 – 250 Hz if you feel there is too much muddiness in your kick drum sound. A boxy kick drum sound is also a common nuisance, which can be fixed by Eq’ing out the boxiness that resides in the area around 300 – 600Hz or so.
I talk a lot about how to get a good-sounding kick drum inside my Drum Mix Toolkit. If you want some of my best advice to get killer drum mixes from my decade of experience mixing drums, check out the Drum Mix Tools here.
If your kick drum is all thump and no snap, then we need to bring out the sound of the beater. We can usually find it around the 2 – 4 kHz area. Depending on the genre of the song, and the type of beater used, different frequency boosts in the beater area generate different sounds. A boost at 2.5 kHz is more of a typical rock sound as opposed to a narrower boost at around 4 kHz, which results in a Hardcore Metal type snap.
71 Free Shortcuts to Easy Separation and Balance in Your Mixes
If you’ve been struggling to hear all the instruments in a mix, my EQ cheatsheet will help you out.
Compression
When mixing drums, along with everything else, using compression is a personal subject, and everyone has an opinion on how things should be compressed. That said, there are a few guidelines you can follow to get a steadier kick drum sound.
How much gain reduction you want from the compressor depends on the genre, the steadiness of the drummer and the feel of the song. I usually start with a ratio of 4:1 or 6:1 and lower the threshold down until I’m compressing around six dBs.
Then I adjust the attack and release depending on what sort of sound I want. A fast attack clamps down on the transient of the kick drum, dulling the initial attack down somewhat, but a slower attack lets the attack of the beater break through before the compressor starts working.
I try to time the release in time with the beat so that the compressor has stopped compressing before the next hit. It’s easy to do this in modern DAWs because you can see the gain reduction meter working, enabling you to tweak the release perfectly in sync with the song.
EQ and Compression are the first processors for any mix session. If you understand how these two processors work, then you’ve solved at least 80% of your mixing problems.
2. Snare Drum Sound
Partner in crime with the kick drum, the snare drum is the other defining rhythmic factor to the song. “It’s all about the snare” an experienced engineer once told me, because it’s what supplies the song with that steady backbeat. Since it’s such an important aspect of mixing drums, there needs to be a lot of care taken with getting the best sound possible.
EQ-wise, there is not an awful lot you need below 100 Hz so that you can start by high-pass filtering all the low end away.
The body of the snare can be brought forward with a little boost at around 150Hz if you feel like it lacks some thickness.
I like thick snares, so I often catch myself adding a little weight to the snare around that area.
If your snare has ringing frequencies that you find annoying, you can try pinpointing them by boosting a particular frequency band with a high Q and sweeping the spectrum until they pop out. I find that sometimes the snare needs a little cut in the mids, either resulting from boxiness at 500 – 800 Hz or too much of a nasal attack from the area around 1 kHz. Enhance the attack of the snare with a broad boost around 2 – 4 kHz and search for the sizzle of the snares in the higher frequencies.
Compression
Like I do with the bass drum, I try to make the snare compress in time with the song. By timing the attack and release, I can get a nice steady snare sound that breathes with each hit. I generally leave the attack at a medium to slow setting so that the snap of the snare is unaffected, and time the release so that it stops compressing just in time for the next hit.
I start with a ratio of 3:1, often going way higher as it depends on the genre how hard I want the compressor to be pumping. You can adjust the threshold so that it is only lightly compressing the peaks for a subtle sound, or you can push the threshold down harder for a heavily compressed sound.
Snare compression is perhaps one of the most argued about subjects in audio production. Every engineer has a particular method to mixing drums, and I think it’s up to you to experiment and get acquainted with the knobs and sliders on your audio compressor so that you can create the sound that you want.
Reverb
You can create an entirely different snare sound by just applying an interesting reverb to it. Whether that’s a rock arena reverb, subdued room or even a spring reverb, different reverbs can transform the sound of your snare drum.
Go through your reverbs and see what type of reverb sounds best with the song you’re mixing. Are you going to add a bright plate reverb to make it stand out, or will you be mixing it into a particular room mode like a small room sound? If you are in a particularly adventurous mood, you can try adding some gated reverb to your snare.
3. Mixing the Toms
EQ’ing
If the toms are playing a big part in your drum sound, mixing them so that they sound punchy and powerful is crucial to creating a great drum sound.
Get them punchy with EQ. The best way to EQ toms is to find the unflattering frequencies with your equalizer. Normally, these are the middle frequencies, from 300 – 800 kHz or so.
Find the boxy and unwanted frequencies, cut them out and then add low-end power and high-end punch as needed.
When mixing drums like toms, sometimes you need to finely cut a few adjacent frequencies instead of scooping out a big portion of the frequency spectrum.
Compressing
By adding a generous amount of compression to your toms, you can get a larger than life sound out of them. You can fatten them up considerably with some tight compression, and with the addition of a little reverb, you can make them sound huge and powerful.
The same rule of subtle compression applies as well to toms if you only want to control the peaks and lightly color their signal.
4. Overheads
The overheads might be the most valuable microphones on the kit. The overheads are supposed to pick up every drum and give a complete sound to your drum kit.
There are two ways of mixing drums with the overheads; you can use them as the primary sound, sculpting every drum around the overhead sound, or you can use them to accent the cymbals and air around the kit.
By adding the overheads to the mix early on, you can get a better sense of the full sound of the kit, making your drum mixing easier.
Just notice how different a snare drum microphone sounds compared to a snare that’s coming from the overhead mics.
By adjusting the overheads with the rest of the close-miked drums, you can get a different sound.
By focusing on the overheads you can get a roomier sound, but if you want a close in-your-face drum sound, you would rather use the overheads as complementary to the rest of the drums, mainly using them to accent the cymbal sounds.
5. The Hi-Hat
Mixing drums is a selective process, meaning that individual elements of the drum-kit only need specific frequency ranges.
You only need a particular frequency range from the hi-hat. Considering that the hi-hat microphone is probably picking up a lot of bleed from other drums, some heavy high-pass filtering is in order. Filter up to 250 Hz at least, even higher if you feel that you aren’t losing anything from the hi-hat sound with greater filtering.
Now if you think something is lacking from the hi-hat, or that you want to bring out the sound of the bell, you can find it in the 200 Hz area. So if your hi-hat needs a little more bto it, you will have to sacrifice that aggressive filtering. Like everything else, just filter until you start hearing the sound becoming compromised and then back off a little bit.
Cutting at 1Khz can reduce the cheap jangly sound from the hi-hat, but you can enhance and give it some sparkle with a boost from 7 kHz or so. Use a high shelving EQ if you want to enhance the high end with some area.
6. Room Mics
Room microphones give a different sound to the drum kit than the regular overhead mics.
Most room mics are recorded at a fair distance, so we get a full sound of the drum kit as well as a significant amount of the reverb of the room. Depending on the sound of the room, these room mics can either sound amazing or horrible.
Mixing Drums With a Roomy Sound
But let’s assume our recording room is great. With a nice room mic picking up the complete kit we can try a few different techniques. We can apply some heavy compression to the room mics to get an even punchier sound.
We can EQ the kit as to draw out the most important elements, such as kick and snare and we can add it underneath an already great drum sound for that final touch.
Mixing Drums Into a Room
If the drums weren’t recorded in a nice sounding room and sound quite dead when they come from the recording stage, it’s time to add some space to our drum tracks.
A good way to add some ambiance to our drum tracks is to add a 0.5-second drum room reverb. You can add a nice amount to the overhead tracks, and maybe even a slightly different reverb to the snare to make it stand out. Go through your reverbs to try to find the best sound to your particular track.
There’s No One Way to Mix Drums
Mixing drums is a challenging but enjoyable aspect of audio production. You can make your drums sound good in so many different ways depending on how you use your EQ, compression and other mixing processors. Because of this, there is no actual one right way of mixing drums.
As always, there are trends in the music industry as to what sounds good right now, but being able to get whatever sound you want, whether it’s huge 80’s toms or a 90’s arena rock snare is an important aspect of being a well rounded mixing engineer.
The only solid piece of advice I can give you for mixing drums is to experiment with all the tools you have on hand. Get every element to sound as good as possible and then try to mold them together to make them sound like a complete whole.
Now that you know how to process the drums, let’s talk about how to put it all together with a step by step process to create an exciting drum mix.
How to Make an Exciting Drum Mix in 9 Simple Steps
The following is an excerpt from the Drum Mix Toolkit. Today we’ll talk about the important fundamentals of getting a great drum mix
Here’s how you’ll learn to mix drums with the Drum Mix Toolkit. I’ll start by giving you a quick start guide that covers the entire process from beginning to end.
Then we’ll expand on each part as necessary in the following chapters. That way you’ll get a broad overview if you want to get started right away on your own, but you’ll be able to refer to the in-depth materials later on if you get stuck.
Sound good? All right, let’s go.
Step 1 – Start Your Initial Balance
The drum track you start with is dependent on two things:
If your drums were recorded with one microphone you don’t really have a lot of options. You can go nuts trying to add samples that match up with the kick and snare but that’s a bit beyond what I’ll be talking about today. Since the drum kit generally requires a combination of several different microphones it can give you multiple options (or headaches!) depending on what kind of sound you’re looking for.
If the song is a folky ballad you’ll probably approach the initial balance differently than if it were a heavy metal song. The natural sound of the folk song might lend itself well to start with the overheads, whereas metal is all kick and snare to start.
These are all questions to keep in mind as you’re doing your initial balance.
Step 2 – Check Polarity/Phase
It is incredibly important to make sure your drum tracks are in “phase”. This can make the difference between a weak kick and a powerful one; it can change your snare from thin and weak to punchy and tight.
Usually, you’ll have a “phase” plug-in or an EQ that has a polarity switch which you can press. If you press it and the drums suddenly become thicker then you’ll know there were some polarity problems in your tracks. We’ll talk about this in more detail later on in the Drum Mix Toolkit.
Step 3 – Group
You’ll want to simplify your drum mix if you have a lot of microphones on the drum kit itself. It’ll make it easier and more efficient to mix later on.
Grouping the drums together is crucial to achieving this and depending on how complex the drum tracks are, there are multiple ways you can simplify your drum mix. We’ll talk about that in more detail later.
Step 4 – Bus Processing
Once you’ve grouped your instruments you can start adding plug-ins and processing to your mix. You should have a fairly balanced drum kit where everything sounds natural and one drum doesn’t overpower another.
Add in EQ, compression, saturation, analog summing or any other processor you’d like to use to sculpt the overall drum sound of the bus.
You can also add parallel processing at this point if you’d like. We’ll talk about bus processing and parallel compression in detail later.
Step 5 – Sample Replacement if Needed
Once the drums are sounding decent as a whole through your bus processing it’s time to move on down to the individual tracks themselves. This is as good a time as any to make sure your kick and snare are up to snuff.
If you’re a fan of sample replacement, you can start switching out the kick and the snare for something more powerful. You can also layer the samples with the original drums, giving you the best of both worlds.
Step 6 – Individual Processing
At this point it’s time to enhance each track as needed. If the drums are sounding really good to you already then you might not even need much processing here. Maybe just a little EQ to cut out some unwanted frequencies, some compression to thicken things up and experiment with something new, like adding saturation for instance.
Also, depending on how much bleed you’re getting through the individual mics you might want to gate the drums. You don’t want the EQ and crunchy compression you’re using on the kick drum to affect the snare drum when it bleeds through to the kick drum mic. Therefore, gating can be a really effective way to clean up your drum sound.
Still a bit confused about EQ? I put together an online course to share more in-depth techniques to improve your mixes using to start getting cleaner and fuller output from your recordings.
Step 7 – Rebalancing
Rebalancing is key. Throughout your mixing process, you’ll constantly keep pushing the faders up and down depending on what processing you’re doing. Even if you manage to gain-stage your plug-ins correctly you’ll probably need to add or subtract some volume to rebalance your drum tracks, both with each other as well as with the rest of the mix.
This is especially true if you work on the drum bus first and then add individual track processing later. The individual track processing will inevitably change how the group processing works so make sure you always go back and forth and rebalance as necessary.
Step 8 – Reverb
At this point, you should have a pretty killer drum sound, but it might be sounding a bit dry. If you have room mics from a big room then you might already have a natural reverb. Depending on the style of the song, this might be enough for you.
If you don’t have any space on your drums you’ll have to send your drums to a reverb. When choosing your reverb you need to think about the genre of the song, the BPM (things can get cluttered fast with a big reverb and a fast song) and the overall style that you’d like.
Step 9 – Blend With the Rest of the Mix
Congratulations! You’re mostly done.
The only thing left to do is to add any sweetening with other effects if you’d like. From there you need to make sure the balance fits with the rest of the instruments and the drums aren’t clashing with any other instrument in the mix, i.e. the kick and bass are sitting well together and the drums aren’t overpowering everything else.
Get My Best Drum Mixing Content With the Drum Mix Toolkit
If you don’t know all the tools you have at your disposal, I’ve put together a package that includes all the tricks and techniques I’ve learned in the last decade of mixing drums.
It’s called the Drum Mix Toolkit, and it’s designed to transform your drums from weak and thin to powerful and punchy.
Here are some techniques you’ll discover when you get your copy:
Hit the link to take your home recordings to the next level.
How to mix drums – Step by Step Guide
Drums make up the backbone of a song. It not only establishes the beat but can also be the most memorable part of a song.
Just like anything else, mixing drums can prove to be very challenging.
If you are new to this, encounters with so many different elements of mixing such as balance, EQ, reverb, compression, bus processing, noise gate, and transient enhancement can look perplexing.
This article is a step-by-step guide that will teach you how to mix drums, and it includes all the tips and tricks I use when mixing drums.
Step 1: Mix bus
Before you can start mixing drums, you need to organize different audio sources.
Multiple snares, kick, or overhead mics need to be sent to their own instrument bus, or you’d have to mix each of them separately.
A mix bus is a way to route one or more selections of audio to specific places such as aux sends, subgroups, and your main L/R mix.
Desired channel or audio is sent to the bus that you choose (Aux Send, Main L/R, VCA, etc.) That signal is fed to the destination you wish by turning up faders or knobs for channels within that bus.
If you have two snare mics, you should set the output of each channel to the same bus and set the input of an aux channel to that bus.
The process will be the same for all other audio sources.
Set the output of each source as a new bus, and then set the input of an aux track as that same bus.
Step 2: Create balance
The next step in learning how to mix drums is finding the right balance.
First, you should solo your drum bus and turn all your mics down.
Then, bring up the most important elements one at a time, usually starting with the kick or the snare. Finally, bring in everything else and balance each drum together until the whole drum set sounds natural.
You need to balance the sound of each element of the kit and the sound of the drums and the other instruments.
To do it, you need to listen to the drum kit and make sure that you can hear each element clearly. The snare is usually the loudest element in the kit, followed by the kick and toms.
You can use the overhead and room mics to make all of the close mics sound united by creating a space for the drums. If you are not sure that you reached the perfect balance, you can use the reference mix.
You can compare the sound of your current mix with some of your best mixes and make sure you are on the right track.
Just listen carefully to each element in the mix and adjust the levels of each drum until you get the balance right.
Step 3: EQ
We came to the fundamental part of how to mix drums called EQ.
Equalization, or EQ, is one of the most well-known forms of audio processing in music production that help you manipulate the frequency response of the instruments in your session.
With EQ, you can the character of an instrument, increase separation, create effects, and more.
Here are some tips and tricks for the EQ of each drum element.
Kick drum EQ
Snare drum EQ
Toms EQ
Cymbals and Overheads EQ
Step 4: Use compressor
A compressor is a useful tool if you want to learn how to mix drums because it allows you to control the dynamic range of your sound.
It’s most commonly used to ensure that no sounds in the mix are too quiet.
You can use compressors in many different ways to shape your drum sound.
For example, if you want a punchy and tight snare drum, you can use a fast attack and release time with a ratio of 4:1.
If you want the soft and round kick drum, you can use a slow attack and release time with a small ratio of 1.2:1.
The compressor takes a sound and decreases its volume if it surpasses a certain threshold so that you can lower the volume of the whole track and make sure nothing gets lost.
The first way to do this is by using a slow attack time.
Attack time is how long it takes for the compressor to get going or how long it waits before compressing the signal.
When you have a slow attack time, you’re letting those low, loud sounds come through before applying compression.
This lets those big bass hits sound full and rich while compressing everything else so that they remain steady and consistent in volume throughout your song.
The second way to use compressors on drums is with fast attack times.
This gives those low sounds less room to breathe, which can be great when you want a more punchy-sounding kick drum or snare drum.
Step 5: Use reverb
Reverb is a highly popular effect to use on many different instruments, but it is especially important if you want to learn how to mix drums.
It helps create depth in the sound by adding artificial reflections to the signal.
This can help you make your drum sounds seem as if they are in a much bigger space than they are.
It is important to note that reverb should be applied after the drum sound has been processed with EQ and compression so that you don’t accidentally affect any of these settings by adding reverb.
When mixing drums, you can use different reverbs:
Step 6: Noise gate and transient enhancement
When learning how to mix drums, you can use noise gate and transient enhancement to your advantage.
A noise gate is designed to eliminate unwanted drum bleed, whereas transient enhancement helps emphasize attack and sustain.
First, let’s talk about the noise gate.
This process is just a way of getting rid of any frequencies you don’t want in your track.
You can set a threshold for the gate. As soon as a signal hits that threshold, it’s simply muted.
This is a great way to keep your mix clean and free from bleeds, but you have to be careful not to accidentally cut out parts of your sound that are actually intentional.
On the other hand, transient enhancement is a completely different technique that results in the opposite effect.
Rather than muting sounds above a certain frequency threshold, you can use a transient enhancement to make those sounds louder.
This is great for emphasizing certain aspects of your drum mix, like attack or sustain.
How do you make drums stand out in a mix?
The volume of the drums will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish.
If you want them to be loud and aggressive, then crank it up.
However, if you want them to be more subtle, you should lower the volume.
If you do want your drums to stand out a bit more, here are some tricks:
Should I mix drums first?
When mixing a song, it’s common to hear several different strategies on how to get started learning how to mix drums.
Some engineers might say you should mix the drums first, while others say you shouldn’t.
Let’s check the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.
Advantages of mixing drums first:
You get a better idea of how to treat the rest of the instruments in your mix.
This is especially true if your song features guitar or other percussion instrumentation that can easily get lost in the snare. If you’re not careful, you’ll get a lot of mud in your mix by default.
By starting with the drums, though, you can get a better idea of what frequencies need to be carved out in order to leave space for those other instruments.
You can save time and make sure everything is working together cohesively.
Disadvantages of mixing drums first:
The downside of mixing drums first is that it can be difficult to go back and make adjustments later, especially if your song has a lot of layers.
If you need to tweak something on your kick drum or snare drum, those changes might affect how the rest of the track sounds.
How do you mix powerful drums?
Drums can be pretty harsh and can easily overtake the sound.
Here are some tips for understanding how to mix drums that have a powerful sound.
For a natural tone, start with a slow attack and a fast release.
More of the initial transient travels through the unit without being compressed when the attack time is slow.
Increase the attack time gradually until you achieve the ideal balance of tight and punchy. For fast drums, quick release times are ideal.
How loud should drums be in a mix?
The first thing to do is make sure your drums sound good on their own.
Put all your faders down, then listen back to the drums.
Don’t forget about the snare!
It’s easy for the snare to get buried in the mix.
Make sure it cuts through and sits nicely with everything else.
The next step is to listen to other songs for reference and see if you can find any patterns in terms of how loud the drums are compared to everything else.
It’s a good idea to do this at several different volume levels.
This will help you get an idea of what works best for different musical styles and genres.
How do you make a snare sound better when mixed?
If you want a snare drum to sound better when mixed, there are a few things you can try.
Here are some tips:
Should you pan drums?
When trying to make your drum sound fill the entire room, panning is one of your most important tools.
If you want to understand how to mix drums, you should consider panning.
Panning drums to the center
When you pan all your drum sounds to the center, it results in a very mono mix, where nothing stands out.
The kick and snare are also not very present in the mix because they share frequencies with other instruments.
When you have a lot of instruments in your mix, it’s important to leave some space for them.
A good way to solve this problem is by using groups and buses.
You can route all your drum sounds to one bus, then push all those sounds together into one sound source, making it easier for you to control that source.
Panning drums across the stereo field
When you pan drums across the stereo field, it results in a clear separation between each sound source, and when processed correctly, it creates stereo width without compromising its mono compatibility.
A disadvantage is that if you want a more narrow sound, you have to process every individual sound separately, which can be time consuming and confusing.
Should drums be recorded in mono or stereo?
Drums can be recorded in mono or stereo.
Every drum should be recorded as its own instrument.
The kick drum, snare drum, and toms are all recorded separately with individual mics. Therefore, they’re in mono.
The overhead and room mics, on the other hand, are captured in stereo.
If you have enough mics to capture the kick, snare, and toms independently, you should record them in stereo.
This will allow you to mix them separately after recording.
Conclusion
Mixing drums can be complicated for those without knowledge of music production.
However, if you decide to learn how to mix drums, start with the main elements such as mix bus, balance, EQ, compressor, reverb noise gate, and transient.
Many beginners do not know how to mix drums, they understand the music, and they know the sound they want.
So, in addition to learning music theory, one of the best ways to improve your ability to mix on the drums is to take existing songs you like and deconstruct their drum sounds.
Add these components into your own drum mix and practice creating these sounds until you are comfortable with them.
You may be overwhelmed with the amount of information about mixing drums.
However, learning about each aspect of mixing can help achieve better results for you and your mixing projects in the future.
Getting started mixing drums
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Learn crucial drum mixing techniques to help you learn where to start, how to think, and what to listen for while you’re building the important rhythmic foundation of your recording.
You’ve written a batch of great songs, worked up some interesting arrangements, tracked core instruments in a crazy weekend, spent a few weeks adding layers and flourishes, gotten a great vocal performance out of your singer, and finally, the whole album is tracked.
Which means: It’s time to mix! But, where do you start?
The first thing many mix engineers will begin shaping is the drums. They’re an obvious starting point and it makes sense: drums usually drive the mood and feel of a song.
So, let’s take a look at some tips for how to approach your drum tracks and get the most out of what you’ve captured.
Tips for mixing kick drum
The heartbeat of every great song you’ve ever shaken your money maker to is the pulse of the kick drum, and the kit is defined by how all the other pieces sound in relation. When you start EQ’ing your kick there are often a couple key trouble spots. You won’t encounter the same things every time, but if you start to hear some issues, take a look at those common problem areas to see if you can clear things up:
In some scenarios you may find that you just can’t seem to get the kick loud enough, where turning the kick up more pushes the meters into the red but still doesn’t deliver the satisfying thump-in-the-chest feeling you want. This can be a case of having too much of the wrong frequencies in the signal.
For example: a boost in the low-end will add a lot of level to the signal in areas below 40 Hz, an area that most speakers can’t reproduce well anyway. If you’re craving a bigger kick drum sound, it might actually mean carefully carving away ultra-low frequencies and muddy low-mids. These frequencies add a lot of level to the signal but aren’t as important to the sound and feeling of the kick drum. With those frequencies carefully managed, you can now turn the kick up more and find that big sound you’re looking for. As a rule of thumb, start your EQ’ing by making cuts before boosting anything.
Once you’ve found a good kick tone for your track, you can then introduce compression to the chain. Many articles could be written on learning to use compression properly (and we have written our share). At minimum, though, remember that a gentle ratio can help tame the initial click you often hear on a recorded kick drum. This will let you increase the overall volume, allowing for a louder, smoother, and more even kick in the mix.
Tips for mixing snare and toms
The relationship between the snare and kick in a song creates the back-and-forth interplay that becomes the foundation for the feel of your tracks, so it’s important to get the tones of both just right. Some snares have a fantastic round tone around 200–250Hz, while other snare drums can sound very muddy in this range.
Often, the snap of the snare that sounds crisp on its own will compete with the sibilance of the lead vocal around 3–5 kHz, which can cause problems. This is a good reason to leave your vocal track up while working on your drums, or at least remember to bring it in every now and then.
Listening to the overtones of your snare as you EQ will help you determine what harmonics might be masking your lead vocal, and where to place the EQ nodes to help emphasize the snare while staying out the way of the vocals. When compressing a snare, as with the kick, you can tame the initial transient with some gentle compression to achieve a smoother sound.
Once you add toms into the mix, how you’ll need to treat them can vary wildly depending on their original tone and character. A lot will be determined by listening to the drum kit as a whole and hearing what needs to be emphasized or de-emphasized. Generally, you want the toms to accent and bring color to the beat but not overwhelm it, so they should sound alive and part of the kit but not jump out of the speakers.
Tips for mixing overhead and ambient drum mics
When mixing drums, some engineers will start with the overhead mics instead of the kick drum to get a picture of the entire drum set, and then bring in the individual pieces as needed. Depending on how many ambient mics you have—whether it’s a single mic, a stereo overhead, or multiple room mics—you can either use them to shape a bigger room sound or to emphasize certain pieces of the kit, like bringing out more wash from the cymbals and hi-hats.
If you need the drums in your recording to sound much wider, try using a mid/side EQ on the drum overheads to add lift in the high end on the side channel and more precise cuts and boosts centered around the kick and snare.
Tips for mixing percussion
Percussion can be used to add rhythmic excitement, but bear in mind that too much can distract the listener from the fundamental core of your mix. Use percussion smartly and sparingly—just because you have a tambourine doesn’t mean you need a hit on every two and four.
Percussion tracks can be anything from shakers and tambourine to congas and timpani to electronic percussion. Since percussion instruments all vary in tone and often take up smaller areas of the frequency spectrum, you can usually apply more drastic EQ adjustments to make the percussion fit into the right space or cut through the mix when needed.
Compressing percussion requires much higher ratios with quicker attack and release times—ratios between 5:1–8:1 often do the trick, even though that may seem heavy on paper. When a percussion sound is too short, smoothing out the transient peaks allows us to hear the decay and character of the sound a little more clearly. You might use a release time as low as 20ms.
Avoiding the doldrums of dull drums
Mixing drums can often get treated like a drudgery that you just need to slog through before digging into all the fun stuff. Everyone wants to turn the knobs and fiddle around with guitars and synths, since that’s where you get to play with all the more interesting, sparkly, and unique sounds.
But, it’s important to remember that working on the mix of the drums can also be an exciting and creative stage of the process. It’s a chance to start putting some aesthetic stakes in the ground and to begin getting a sense for what the whole recording will sound and feel like in the end.
A recording of a drum set can be pushed in many directions, from soft and pillowy to epic and bombastic, and the choices you make when building the sound of the kit will affect the personality of the elements that sit on top.
So, embrace the process, roll up your sleeves, and start shaping your song.