With so much emphasis put on gear, audio plugins, and mixing techniques, sometimes it’s easy to forget the basic preparation for the mix which is no less important. We start from scratch with the drums…
With ever more accessible, high quality gear and software audio tools available to us, it’s perhaps inevitable that with all those toys to play with the basics can often get overlooked. Added to this, following the lead of users with high online profiles, the inexperienced engineer just starting out could be forgiven for thinking that shiny boxes and audio plugins are the only things that matter for a great production. While it’s true to say that in the right hands, premium gear makes a positive difference to the final outcome, any engineer who actually makes a living from their work will tell you that the basics must be got right above all else.
Getting Mixes Ready
Any mix needs an organised foundation on which it can be built. Things can move very quickly during the recording process, leaving the engineer with no choice but to restore some order back into their DAW session once the artist has gone home. Some people are able throughout the process to step around the mess created in the white heat of creation, but for everyone else, it makes sense to get everything into shape before the next phase of the project happens; the mix. In most modern productions, the drum tracks themselves can be thought of as a submix for the purposes of organisation, as they themselves can contain many channels that require attention.
Things To Consider
Fundamentally, organising drum sub mixes (and by extension, the mix in general) does two things. Firstly it speeds workflow by allowing quicker identification of items and navigation around the session, and secondly it improves the audio quality of the mix. The importance of removing extraneous audio clutter is equally important in both sparse and dense mixes, as the former cannot mask noise while any accumulations of it in a busy mix can risk eating into mix headroom, especially at LF.
Asset Management At its simplest, consolidating disparate parts onto fewer tracks and using show/hides is a great way to swap screen space for headspace. Following on from that, tracks without clear meaningful names can be renamed. Any assets on the timeline whose names don’t match up can be changed if desired, either on a session-wide basis or at file-level if you’re sure.
Session Layout Paying attention to track order will be second nature to many engineers, as will be the use of colour in a way that makes sense to them. While the convention of rhythm tracks to the left ending with topline parts, returns, subgroups, and masters to the right will be familiar to those who have worked on analogue consoles, this intuitive layout can work for anyone.
Killing Noise The final piece of the puzzle is getting rid of low-lying noise on all tracks, and the need for can be especially apparent on drums. Lots of loud things in close proximity to each other with mics on will accumulate all kinds of acoustic and mechanical noise, and killing it through manual editing, muting clips, or using a strip silence type tool can work well. Gating is especially suited to drums is where sidechain filtering techniques come into their own. Watch in the video how we apply these principles to a drum submix, paying special attention to noise.
In the video below I illustrate these points using a Pro Tools session, however all of these techniques are equally viable in you DAW of choice whatever that might be.
An Easy Life?
If the intention is to get any mix done in an environment that’s easy to navigate and free from noise-buildup, taking a few minutes at the start with your drums before organising the rest of the mix is going to make your mixing life much easier..