Need help with processing drums - please

Hi everyone

I'm in real need of some help with compression and eq of drums; kicks, snares, hats. 1) What comes first? Compression or eq? 2) does compressing and/or eq a kick drum differ from the way you'd compress and/or eq a snare or hat, heck do I even need to compress a hat?

Sorry if the questioning is too broad, I must state that I'm fairly new to this topic.

Thanks in advance.

first, you want to fire up phantom power on your mixer. use xlr for beats, 1/4" is rubbish (unless you're using tip only). some of your tracks should be muted, at least partially. i need to ask, are you using hats? those should be solo'd and the aux returns cranked all the way up. i might as well tell you hats should always be panned hard right or if you're doing ambient left could work. put compression on one of the buses and route all the bass to it. don't even worry about gain ratios, just make sure the bass is clipping and in the red. for the snares (you're using 808 right? since this is an electronic song you're making right?) turn the high end up and cut off the mids and lows. then you want to use a hall reverb on this with the longest decay your system can take. this will give your beats that pumping sound. this is also called side chain compression. nb, never use front chain compression unless you want a completely fat beat. for more chemical brothers type stuff you're going to want to like, sample your break beats from james brown. for complex ae beats, sample from rob brown (i have his number pm me). over the whole mix you should lay down a low pass filter, think of this as a blanket where your beats can rest all cozy and shit amidst the flurries of your melodies and pads and sound fx. if you're using sound fx you should be getting them from old Halloween records if you want them to sound right. fluttering bat wings make really good hats. never use toms though, those are fucking lame and always sound corny. aphex uses mostly computers for his beats, you don't want to start there though bc it'll take you ages to learn how to use stuff like algorithms, vst, granular and shit like that. way too complex for a beginner. you're using an mpc right? cool, the pros use that. you can easily do stuff like dr. dre's the chronic with that. just sample jazz and r&b if you're making hip hop. for a really cool trick save your finished mix as a pdf so listeners can open it and see all the ins and outs of your composition so it'll do their heads in innit.

Yep, alcofribas' post sums it up nicely.

alco - there's a bad smell in the air, a little shade of sexual frustration and confusion of orientation perhaps, the car-sickness of a life that has shaped you withering and uncoordinated mental refrain towards the dark, and meaningless persuit of a life that is only carried, dragged if you will, along by the beating, by the firing of all that is wasted -

<blockquote class='ipsBlockquote'data-author="EleminoP" data-cid="1930695" data-time="1358048606"><p>

Yep, alcofribas' post sums it up nicely.</p></blockquote>

He's not letting you get on your knees is he, what a generous gentleman!

  On 1/13/2013 at 2:56 AM, chenc91dub said:

Hi everyone

I'm in real need of some help with compression and eq of drums; kicks, snares, hats. 1) What comes first? Compression or eq? 2) does compressing and/or eq a kick drum differ from the way you'd compress and/or eq a snare or hat, heck do I even need to compress a hat?

Sorry if the questioning is too broad, I must state that I'm fairly new to this topic.

Thanks in advance.

The first question should be "Do I want/need compression?" If I was making like 606/303 acid house I wouldn't use compression on individual elements (though I def would compress the 2-bus). Compression was originally designed to control dynamics in performances, so in the case of electronic music it is used mostly for character.

As far as kick drums, it depends.

If the kick is chopped from a break, then you probably want to remove some of the hi-end and boost the fundamental (usually between 60-140hz). The usual reason to compress a kick is to make it punchier (try slow attack fast release). A common trick for punchyness in kick drums is to mix the compressed signal 50/50 with the dry one (known as 'parallel compression').

Compressors are very sensitive to low-end so you should put EQ after if you don't want it to influence the compression.

GL

  On 1/13/2013 at 7:01 AM, LimpyLoo said:

  On 1/13/2013 at 2:56 AM, chenc91dub said:

Hi everyone

I'm in real need of some help with compression and eq of drums; kicks, snares, hats. 1) What comes first? Compression or eq? 2) does compressing and/or eq a kick drum differ from the way you'd compress and/or eq a snare or hat, heck do I even need to compress a hat?

Sorry if the questioning is too broad, I must state that I'm fairly new to this topic.

Thanks in advance.

 

The first question should be "Do I want/need compression?" If I was making like 606/303 acid house I wouldn't use compression on individual elements (though I def would compress the 2-bus). Compression was originally designed to control dynamics in performances, so in the case of electronic music it is used mostly for character.

 

As far as kick drums, it depends.

 

If the kick is chopped from a break, then you probably want to remove some of the hi-end and boost the fundamental (usually between 60-140hz). The usual reason to compress a kick is to make it punchier (try slow attack fast release). A common trick for punchyness in kick drums is to mix the compressed signal 50/50 with the dry one (known as 'parallel compression').

 

Compressors are very sensitive to low-end so you should put EQ after if you don't want it to influence the compression.

 

GL

Thanks for that - another reason to remain in these forums, not everyone is a tool.