Contest: 8-channel drum mix

H

HollowMan1975

New member
I have an 8-channel drum mix project (slash: challenge?) to offer up...

Our band is working on our first album, and in July completed the tracking of the drums for all of the songs. We rented a Boss BR-1600CD and a host of microphones and recorded the drums to a click. It took many weeks of splicing and realigning in Sonar to fix any deviations from the click track and tighten things up, but now we're ready to track the guitars and bass and start thinking about the final mix.

To get us there, I thought I'd try a quick mix on my own of the drums, and I thought I could use the help of the people here to offer some advice. I've uploaded the 8 mono drum tracks here:

Track1:

Track2:

Track3:

Track3:

Track5:

Track6:

Track7:

Track8:


And I uploaded my best attempt here:



Our drummer plays a fairly large kit (as you can see at the bottom).

For the microphones, we used:

Track1: Kick (2 x Shure Beta 52, halfway in towards the skin, offset)
Track2: Snare (Shure SM57, from the side)
Track3: Overhead Left (Samson C02, 2 ft above RH cymbals pointed to L)
Track4: Room/Overhead Center (SP B1, 4ft off floor direct front center)
Track5: Overhead Right (Samson C02, 2 ft above LH cymbals pointed to R)
Track6: Tom15" (Audix clip-on drum mic)
Track7: Tom14" ("" "")
Track8: Tom13" ("" "")

Would anyone be willing to take a shot at mixing these tracks? We're going for a sort of heavy pop/rock vibe, more towards a progressive sound than, say, a punk sound. I'm not quite sure if I'm that crazy about the snare sound. Our drummer plays a Neil Peart signature snare (one of those real expensive black ones with the gold hardware that costs $1000) and we just couldn't get the right sound micing from the top or the side. I noticed the overheads pick up so much of the snare sound that it almost makes Track2 redundant, but it does give me the flexibility to try using that track to queue a trigger and utilize a drum replacer.

Anyways, I'd really like to hear what others could come up with for a mix. We're a pretty low key outfit, always trying to find out ways to do things ourselves and learn something along the way. It would be a really cool experiment to hear what others did to the tracks (compressor settings, eq, etc) and post them here, and kinda treat it like a contest. The winner (or hell, all helpful entries) would receive a copy of our CD, and the person who's approach and advice we end up following for our final mix would receive credit in the liner notes. Not a high paying gig... I know.... but we're home recordists :)

Please give it a shot, thanks!
 

Attachments

  • MineAllMine_drumkit_layout.jpg
    MineAllMine_drumkit_layout.jpg
    57.1 KB · Views: 400
Hi Jim:

I'm hoping some people like yourself might download the individual drum tracks and try their luck at mixing them together to make a single stereo drum file. I'm interested to hear what sort of approaches people might take when they have the flexibility of 8 separate tracks. In Sonar, I did my best to move the individual tracks back/forward in time to put them in phase, usually with the snare. The overheads were all set equal distances from the kick drums and the snare, so they were all relatively in phase. Since the main snare drum is the one in the center (not off to the side), that made things a bit easier. Then I moved the snare on Track 2 to coincide with the overheads, and did the same thing with the Tom tracks and the kick.

For my attempt at the mix, I put them all in CoolEdit and routed them all to a single bus, then put on a compressor at about 7:1 at -20db. Then I tried to do that 'New York compression' trick where you pile the compressed and uncompressed mixes together and bring them both up equally. I think it sounds okay, but I prefer a dry snare sound, and I'm not so sure that the kick has the right sound either.
 
sweet jeebus

Track Rat said:
I'm not sure what mangled the cymbals, the mp3 conversion or something earlier on in the tracking process but they sound poopie to me. Try this on for size.
http://www.nowhereradio.com/artists/?aid=1331/singles.shtml
Click to expand...

Wow, what an improvement! The whole mix is more clear and crisp, and it sounds like a different snare; did you use the snare track to trigger a replacer? Can you tell me what other settings you used?

I think I know what you mean about the cymbals, they're kind of muffled on my mix, but they sound much better on yours. You know, once I added the B1 mic in the middle, it sounded much much better than our original attempts. In fact, try listening to Track 4 (B1) versus Track3/5 (Samson C02). B1's are so cheap, I may pick up another 2 just so that next time I can do all the overheads and the room mic with large diaphram condensors.
 
pdadda: I can host the file on the band website. Just email me the mix at pjhollow(at)hotmail.calm and I'll post the link here for everyone.

sine707: Track 3 and Track 5 are the left and right overheads, respectively. They were both mic'd in the same manner, with Samson C02 mics positioned a couple feet over their respective cymbals. We took some photos of the setup during tracking and I'll dig those photos up and post them here.
 
I was interrested in doing this but I dont care to mess with the MP3 files....you have lost quality from the very beginning. Do you have the files in .wav format? If you do, that is what we need to be mixing...especially if you plan to use a mix you get from this contest....
 
thajeremy said:
I was interrested in doing this but I dont care to mess with the MP3 files....you have lost quality from the very beginning. Do you have the files in .wav format? If you do, that is what we need to be mixing...especially if you plan to use a mix you get from this contest....
Click to expand...

I do have the .wav files, and I can certainly post them tomorrow. I made the mp3's at 192kbps to try and retain as much of the fidelity of the original recording while making it relatively easy on bandwidth for downloading. I A/B'd the wav's and 192k mp3's and couldn't hear a difference at all. At 192 I don't hear any difference. At 160 it's ever so slightly different, and I can really hear it at 128... it gets quite swishy.

For the album, I'll be mixing everything from the wav files, using the settings we determine here that give the best effect. All the drum tracks were recorded over 2 weekends using exactly the same setup/mics. So what I learn here I should be able to apply to the drums on every song on mixdown.
 
I see....I was gonna offer to host the files for you if you didnt have space to do so...but since you do.....also, it might not be a bad idea to leave the mp3's for people who are on dial-up....
 
D'oh! So right you are. Let me fix that.

Track1:

Track2:

Track3:

Track4:

Track5:

Track6:

Track7:

Track8:
 
Last edited:
I like OCnors drums better becuase the kick is slappy sounding. Boost at 5K and lo mid cut. Track Rats kick was more clicky (Boost at 4K, n lo mid cut) which works good for metal, but I prefer slappy. :)
Hats at the start of the track on TrackRats mix werent hi passed enough so the hats sounded clunky rather than thin and shimering.

Good mixes both though.

Eck
 
HollowMan1975 said:
That one also sounds livelier than mine. The room sound is more pronounced in the snare. You and track_rat used very different approaches in the kick and snare. What steps did you take?
Click to expand...
I used a parametric EQ to subtract some of the hollow sound from the kick. The snare track sounded like it was mic'd from the bottom so I made a copy of it and inverted the phase. I used the snare bleed over from the tom tracks by lowering the tom hits to match the bleed level. Once I had the levels correct I ran the whole mix through a small room reverb and then through a slightly larger reverb to give it some space. Then I used a parametric EQ to roll off some of the high mid frequencies to give it a smoother sound.
 
Interesting to see how different other people mix.

I would never have thought of using bleed on Tom tracks to get a better sounding snare. I go for the OHs and then the snare close mic to add more in your face punch.

Eck
 
I thank you sir. No samples were used here, just the MP3s you provided routed out to an analog console. I rely on bleed from all the mics to get a composit sound and by that I mean the meat of the kick and snare. I like parallel compression (New York style) to get some attitude in drums. I set up a good stereo mix of the drums going on and also assign the kick, snare and toms (not the overheads) and send that to a stero subgroup out to a compressor (in this case an RNC) and step on it hard. About a 6/1 ratio with about 6 dB of reduction. I bring that back to two channel on the console and push it up under the existing stereo drum mix to taste.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top