Saturday, November 3, 2012

Drum Mixing pt2 - American Drum sound/parallel processing

By Tim Dolbear - www.timdolbear.com

Hey all, So lets look at parallel processing and drums.  This is a way to build huge amounts of density into the sound.  First take your drum tracks, lets say you have a Kick, Snare, Overs, and toms, eq and level them to where you want them, then depending on the type of DAW you are on, you need to buss these tracks in a way that they play out normally and at the same time through a second track...

In Samplitude, I send all the drum tracks to a Buss, then on that Buss I send the signal out an AUX fader to an AUX track which acts as my parallel processing track. You could also just buss the drums to a Buss and put a compressor on there that allows for parallel processing, or in simple term, has a MIX knob where you can blend the dry and the compressed signals together.

The goal here is to smash the drums on the processed track and then bring it up under the main drum sound. This can make the drums HUGE sounding.

The goto compressor standard for this is an 1176, set on 8:1, with attach at 3:00 and the release set to 5:00 or as fast as possible.  You want the compressor to have a fast attach, as to not really let any transients through, and about 10db of reduction or smashing in this case. You can also make the attack as fast as possible too, set to 5:00, but you will add extra inter-modulation distortion that you may or may not want.

A new plug on the market that works good inline, meaning no need for a separate send, is the new UBK-1 plugin. It allows for mixing or blending in of the direct signal, and it does a great 1176 style sound.

I suggest that if you have not messed around with this that you give it a try.