Drum Mixing and Routing

Everything goes to a drum bus with a comp and rarely an eq. That’s kinda it for me. If I’ve tracked the drums,the room mics are a huge part of the sound and I take a lot of time getting that right from the start and it keeps me from having to do a parallel comp thing.

My main drum verb sends come off the room mics almost exclusively. Then if it’s a slow tempo tune I’ll hit a send off the top snare mic to an 1/8th or 16th delay no repeats into a plate verb. I really dig that sound when it’s dialed back and just gives a feeling a space around the kit.

Drum bus hits a decapitator and every once in a while, maag eq4. That goes to the mix bus but also to a drums comp bus that goes to an acme opticom working a bit. Also a parallel bus with kick and snare mics to a dynamite compressing heavily on RMS mode

All kick mics (including samples if there are any) to a kick bus, snare mics to a snare bus, etc. toms routed again from individual drum groups (I always mic top and bottom heads) to a toms bus, if I’ve chopped up the tom tracks, an unedited version of them get their own bus as well. OH and any spot cymbal mics to an overheads bus and rooms to a room mic bus.

Snare and usually toms sent to an altiverb or two and/or reverberate, tverb, ew spaces, etc. snare and Tom mics and overheads to Ocean Way plug and sometimes snare gets something short - EMT250 plug or some Valhalla thing in room or vintage verb.

Snare goes to a H910 also with some version close to the drum thickener setting

I set up a drum parallel compressor (I'm into the Chandler UAD these days, Waves API2500 before that for a while) from an aux. I set it up on all the drums tracks, but usually have the OH, Hat and Room mics muted. I start with the send faders at unity, post-fader so the mix 'matches' the drums being sent to the faders on the console (for summing). Sometimes I'll alter the send levels, sometimes I'll unmute the tracks that I muted the sends on. It depends on the mix how much of the parallel compression is mixed in, but it's usually a healthy amount. I generally try to make the parallel comp and the room mics take care of ambience. Sometimes I'll use artificial reverb if I must, or if I'm trying to make something sound like a certain time.

I kinda like SSL type plugins on BD and SD sometimes or API plugs. Often I EQ the BD in tracking, so often I don't need more in mixing. BD and SD often are tracked with compression, so that's usually sorted as well. SOMETIMES I EQ overheads, and slightly more often I EQ room mics. Rooms usually just a shelf, so stock EQ is fine.

I can't remember the last time I EQ'd a tom...

I’ve worked similar to Svart in reaper for years, it gives such exacting control over stuff. I will often add another track or two of snare or kick, just for “smack” or “early reflections” or whatever, and honestly I rarely use samples. My problem has been every time someone wants a quick edit, I have way too many tracks and it’s a bit challenging.

Something I learned last few years (thanks Svart) you can put all the drums into one multi-channel track, like a stereo wav except it’s the whole kit. Then you can splice and move the whole kit as if it’s a single stereo wave, everything is time locked to each other. So I’m considering how to use that, and route things to my mix tracks

Another thing I’ve done: drums get their own session, mixed and recorded back as a stereo file through some gear. Fly it to the mix session as a stereo track. It forces me to stop wasting time and move on with my life. I can always import the original stems if I need to and blend them in.

Reaper encourages that kind of routing because track folders are always busses.

Parallel compression is mostly a crutch for poorly set and poorly chosen compressors. Same as excessive drum micing is a crutch for poor drums and poor micing and the raw tracks usually sound like shit and the “engineer” who usually only “records” sample based music and blames the player.

right now in software you have multiple options with working fast attacks/releases that can process the transients independently of the working attack and then modernish hardware that doesn’t have the transient processing ability but has a much wider variety of working attack/release behavior than software does. People just want to use well advertised poor emulations and clones of shit from the 60s that wouldn’t work very well to begin with for what they want to do and parallel compress it into some too loud pumpy random mess and limit it afterwards into some 2d thing on the same plane as the vocalist or the drum kit ends up in front of the vocalist or painted onto the back wall.

Personally, I'll only compress the drum bus if I want an obviously compressed drum bus thing. Otherwise it's a limiter or a clipper for me, for a more invisible peak control. I can often get away with a lot.

Don't do too much sub-grouping within the kit unless for something very intentional.

I'm with another poster in that parallels (if used) will be done outside of the main drum group. Then the main drum group + parallels will go to a drums all bus that might see further peak control from a limiter or clipper. I might parallel the kick, snare, or full kit depending.

If I'm doing the just peak limiting thing, then a squishy drum parallel blended in can lead to a really exciting and open overall sound.

I really like TDR Molot for my squishy parallel atm. With softube overstayer on the treble distortion setting. Otherwise I'll run it out to a 33609 cos it's a silver bullet on drums.

Saturation on groups I'll add late in the game if I cant get to where I need to be on the individual tracks.

Get something with working fast attack/release where you can control the transients man. Total control. Think Powair punch slider or Molot GE's alpha/sigma knob that changes the transfer function of the attack to let more of the initial transient pass through unmodulated. Unisum I guess can do something similar too but it's not one knob or slider. Then you can get the squish of a faster attack but still have punchy transients.

I call bullshit.

Spend some time working on the balance of the drum tracks. Make sure they sound like a unified instrument, with some air around them.  Then blend other things to that sound, or blend that sound to the other things. Sometimes turning things DOWN is the best way to make things clear and present. 

Nah I don't believe any of that. Not my experiences.

Contrary to what I said earlier I do use parallel compression. Often. And not only on drums, vocals are a prime target. Like anything else chosen & applied with thought there are tremendous benefits. Tone. Dynamic control. Headroom?! Making things more aggressive or even smoothing edges so they sit back in the mix. I've done plenty of mixes where the snare is coming up on 7 or 8 channels of desk. Guilty! 

As a for hire mix guy I get all kinds of stuff. Songs cut by hitter tracking cats in great rooms with great sources. I also get cardboard drums cut in cardboard practice rooms with nothing more then SM57's shoved through a presonus interface. Saul good. Bebop to drop tuned stoner rock. I don't discriminate.  

Speaking in generalizations? Most of the pro stuff is fairly condensed. They usually aren't sending things like 20+ mics on a 4 piece kit. Usually push up the faders and well, rad! What's next? 

The groups working in a cardboard box don't have enough gear or experience to really hang themselves with 4 mics on a kick drum. They're usually barely scraping shit together and can only dream of being that stupid... 

Those projects? They usually have something their going for but is completely out of reach. Like they want to sound like Perfect Circle or Smashing Pumpkins and well... they're looking at a badly drawn egg shaped object and a pulverized zucchini. Not quite on target but like one of my favorite mastering engineers says? Nothing that $40k of outboard gear can't fix!   

Some of the craziest stuff comes from the third kind... people in the middle with just enough experience & resources to be dangerous. That's when I get like 4 mics on a kick drum plus sample tracks. Maybe they don't know what they're actually doing and copying stuff they see in the movies... or its some kind of option paralysis? Either way those projects are almost always the least defined & hardest to sort out. 

If anything that's probably why I don't have too many "automatic" things that I always do. Everything is different from project to project... one size fits all? That doesn't fly. Sometimes the music is asking for a metric ton of processing... sometimes all it needs is a tiny bit of squish and minor touch up EQ.

Hopefully, on a good day which isn't everyday... I can pull up faders and if the producer & recordist did their job? The music itself will tell me everything it needs. 

For the record (pun intended), my parallel track doesn't pump. It's squished flat. That's the purpose of it. I add it back in once the track is coming together so that I get more "body" from the drums if the shells aren't audible enough. It's probably 12 to 15dB down in the mix. Just enough.