What's your technique to add depth and life to drums?

Snare will get a sample, sometimes 2 or 3 stacked. It might also get a snare-only room sample. Parallel drum bus for adding or subtracting body of the shells. Sends to snare verb (really short plate for thickness), drum-only verb(nonlinear or medium-short room with slow attack and fast decay) and room emulation verb (stylized longer reverb for accentuating a room sound).

Distortion!  Usually a crunchy clipper like JST clip or perhaps the warmth setting on Arouser set really high, placed on the drum bus.

I generally don't like reverbs on the actual tracks mainly due to high PDC values during tracking.  I usually place them as sends so I can shut them down during recording to keep latencies down if I don't need to monitor through them.

I am out of the habit of using reverb on drums.

I do want a room mic (or mics) and, failing that, will use samples with good ambience to recreate the sound of the snare (in particular) exciting a room. SD3 with Hansa is great for that, when needed.

The biggest lesson for me, learned long ago when I muted an in-the-room scratch vocal and my drum sound fell apart, is that a mic pointed away from the drums can be the key to creating depth/ambience. For me anyway.

What are some of everyone’s favorite reference tracks for drums?

Wallflowers Bringing down the Horse

Any time Jay Bellerose is playing drums and Ryan Freeland is the engineer. Lots of those records about. A few are:







Lots of Sara bareilles records are great too. I think this is Jay on this as well.




The Mayer records with Sterling on drums are all great. Amazing player.

An old vintage kit with some character + 3 mics or less + cool sounding room + distortion via patching through misc gear (ie old preamps, tape machines, tubes EQ/Limiters etc)
Plus a good drummer obviously

In the plug-in world.....Soundtoys Devil-Loc Deluxe at the end of the chain can certainly inject some depth and life.

A lot of cool info here. I agree with a lot of stuff.

Important things I wanted to mention for my process/sound:

Overhead stereo image (really, any mics that give you detail) needs to be appropriate with the arrangement of the rest of the track. Nothing sounds 3D if everything is in everything else's way.

i love having a mono room mic plus a pair for stereo room. Reverb as insert? Only sometimes on my mono room when I want to make it feel a little more blurry but want to maintain what's good about it.

Find a door far from the drums, close it most of the way, put a mic on the other side. That pretty late drum thing is really cool. Use a delay plugin to help place it in a time relationship to the other mics that feels good.

Keep as much ring in your drums as the arrangement/density of the track will tolerate. Let the snare be a little long. Let the toms be a little long. Don't over-mute the kick. That stuff will disappear especially if you rely on the overheads and rooms for the majority of the kit sound. So much of the personality is in the ring. Check if the ring is too long by listening in context. The more complete a scratch track/rough demo/prepro session you have the better.

Keep as much 500hz-1kHz as you can. That's where all the flavor is. It's easy to cut it all out. Leave as much as possible to get the throaty/knocky/grunty stuff. I'm still cutting it on many sources (either in tracking or in mixing) but I'm not cutting as much as I used to. Cut more early in the mix and remember to come back and try to push some up every now and then. I'll often use a close kit/room mic as my main source for that stuff. I constantly try to push it up more.

My mixes got better when I started implementing a snare room sample in addition to the room mics and the reverbs. Blend a couple reverbs to give you a layered ambience.

I hear a lot of distortion when soloed but not as much in context. If I'm working in a rock track then a lot of saturation/clipping/limiting is happening. I also like JST Clip (like svart mentioned) but I also like Reaper's Event Horizon, the Kush Omega saturations, and the saturations in my Console 1 channel strips. Boz's +10db for compression if I need more poke/teeth.

I think a lot of self taught DAW learners do that. Never having to deal with a console with 6 sends and 2 reverb units (max) in the rack makes life a little different.  

I love when all I ever put on drums is a parallel comp and room mics.  I happens a lot.  I'm a complete make it happen in the simplest way possible and make it sound like humans played an instrument. 

Nuke the room.

I'm surprised you can get a decent drum sound with only 16 mics.

No other drastic move works every time.