#Mix bus processing chain how to

What to use? The standard API2500 is a good place to start. mix to a drum bus with an overall limited on it. Balance achieved, each mic with small amounts of compression and/or limiting so that your balance doesn't get destroyed in an exuberant performance. EQing kicks and toms to have an impact without being tubby or thin? Natch.

#Mix bus processing chain how to

The Where do you go? Assuming you know how to balance close mics with room mics and overheads and front of kit mics, and creat a decent balance, most of your work is done on a channel level to have each track contribution meaningful. It all starts with having your drums in tune, and the right tuning at that, then using the right heads, Watching out for cross-modulation with tunings between drums being too close and causing weird sympathetic vibrations that bring out the worst being dealt with first. I have the drums set as a group so I can move all the faders with one, but turn it off to make balance changes. I prefer it to be fed by the drum close mics, and often mute the send on the OH, Hat, and Room mics, but I set it up so all the drum channels are sent, so it's easy to see what happens when they are added to the parallel. It's usually somewhat far down on its fader, but sometimes I automate that instead of the drum mics. I start with the Ryan Hewett Drum parallel Crush preset (I know I hate presets for compressors, but damn if this isn't a good starting point).

After getting into UAD world, I've become really into the Chandler Zener (also Softube, so no need for UAD, but it was in Greg's system). For some projects I would go with the McDSP 6030 for choices, but often chose the Neve emu. I like it better than the UAD2500 for drum parallel. For a long time I used the API2500 as drum parallel and I still think it sounds great for that. After switching to PT after some time I started doing more and more things ITB. On the console I really like the RNC, in regular mode (nice mode is boring AF). I set up a drum parallel from the get go. If the transients aren't processed and raised up with the body, if you are using a two bus compressor, or limiter, they will pump the rest of the mix in unwanted ways if limited (even with fast attack and release, it's still on the whole mix) and sometimes can't even be clipped off because the resulting oscillations might raise the volume even more so and it's distorting ugh Today's mostly itb teeny bopper and pop rap mixes are usually terrible about effective peak control though.ġ) A stereo compressor with a sigmoid function curve on the attack portion of the smoothing filter to keep the hits while being able to sit the drum bus back in the stereo image, where it would be on stage, with a moderately fast attack and release slow enough to not pumpĢ) Do the same thing but instead of keeping the hits, convert them into distortion with soft clippers or distort them and pump up the body. Or get the pump with the kick or snare beat that you want and mix into it. Or you could just straight up do it right away to say limit a snare to not modulate the other drum tracks and hear the modulation and then hear it go away. The main thing is unlike slapping a colored mix bus compressor on and riding the faders and eqing into it so you need to set it very early on, a drum bus compressor is usually set a little later in the mixing of the drums and you adjust them into it. There are two common choices to raise the RMS and sit the drum kit with things such as high gain guitars or slammed vocals.