My kick drums never seem to cut thru the mix, but when i burn off a cdr i can hear them a little more upfront. Im thinking this must be a problem with the room? The room is about 13x13, my monitors are on top of milk crates 4 inchs from the wall, carpet floor, couch, entertanment center,open door way to kitchen, typical living room setup. Ive tweeked around with eq, and still not happy. Idea's anyone?
where are my kick drums?
- Thread starter detuned6
- Start date
If they sound good while tracking, but are getting lost in the mix, you're probably trying to enhance the wrong frequencies in an effort to bring them out.
I'm running into a similar problem with the mixes I'm doing now. I mic'd the kick using a SP B1, which normally sounds great in this application, but I got a little too much mush while tracking. What I'm doing while mixing is sending a stereo image of the drums (with an EQ cut at around 200-300hz to clean up the mush) to an aux and am doing either of two things: I'll set the EQ to accentuate the top end of the bass kick, bring out a little sub bass, and flesh out the toms. I may or may not add a teeny-tiny amount of simple delay or reverb here, depending on what it needs. Or, I'll run it through a multi-band compressor (with no EQ) with the emphasis on accenting the kick.
I set the original drum spread relatively wide and the aux in the center. It has helped the drums quite a bit for me.
I'm running into a similar problem with the mixes I'm doing now. I mic'd the kick using a SP B1, which normally sounds great in this application, but I got a little too much mush while tracking. What I'm doing while mixing is sending a stereo image of the drums (with an EQ cut at around 200-300hz to clean up the mush) to an aux and am doing either of two things: I'll set the EQ to accentuate the top end of the bass kick, bring out a little sub bass, and flesh out the toms. I may or may not add a teeny-tiny amount of simple delay or reverb here, depending on what it needs. Or, I'll run it through a multi-band compressor (with no EQ) with the emphasis on accenting the kick.
I set the original drum spread relatively wide and the aux in the center. It has helped the drums quite a bit for me.
DigitMus
Member
It's kind of hard to troubleshoot your specific problem without knowing specifics of mic positions/distances (from each other and the walls, floor, cieling...) and a host of other factors. The fact that the kick is more prominent after you've burned the mix might indicate a cancellation of low frequencies at your mix position. Again, it's hard to know without being there. It doesn't really matter, because the fact is you don't like the sound you're getting, so here are some suggestions.
Try moving the drums to a different part of the room (this won't cure room nodes/comb filtering, but will shift the locations of nodes/cancellations - hopefully away from your mics). Try moving the mics relative to each other (you could have a great sound on the kick mic only to have it sucked away when you bring another mic ointo the mix due to phase differences). Try inverting the polarity (often called flipping the phase) of the kick mic, as this will change the phase relationship to the other mics. Check your mixes on a good set of headphones - not so good for checking imaging or ambience/reverb, but great for checking EQ/spectral balance without having any room monitoring anomalies.
I know this sounds like a lot of work, but good, no, make that great, recordings take a lot of work
Scott
Try moving the drums to a different part of the room (this won't cure room nodes/comb filtering, but will shift the locations of nodes/cancellations - hopefully away from your mics). Try moving the mics relative to each other (you could have a great sound on the kick mic only to have it sucked away when you bring another mic ointo the mix due to phase differences). Try inverting the polarity (often called flipping the phase) of the kick mic, as this will change the phase relationship to the other mics. Check your mixes on a good set of headphones - not so good for checking imaging or ambience/reverb, but great for checking EQ/spectral balance without having any room monitoring anomalies.
I know this sounds like a lot of work, but good, no, make that great, recordings take a lot of work
Scott
bring out the kick!
I too have often had this problem since a lot of the tunes I do are in drop D tuning and everything is low and heavy to begin with.
One thing I often do is use a spectral analyzer plug in...then you can solo the bass drum track and visually see where the 'strength' is...or which frequencies are most dominant. These frequencies will usually be the main drum sound.
So, typically I will then go back to the bass guitar and guitar tracks...and really drop out those frequencies with eq. Of course, hopefully that shouldn't change the guitars or bass guitar sound too much (it usually doesn't). Another thing I've used along with this is to actually make a copy of the bass drum track (if your using a digital editor). Now you have two tracks of the bass drum...you will have to reduce the volume levels on both of them, however, you will get a much seemingly stronger sound without getting mushy by adding too much eq or anything. I dunno...I've really found this to work for me.
Clearing out eq zones in the other instruments usually does the trick though.
I too have often had this problem since a lot of the tunes I do are in drop D tuning and everything is low and heavy to begin with.
One thing I often do is use a spectral analyzer plug in...then you can solo the bass drum track and visually see where the 'strength' is...or which frequencies are most dominant. These frequencies will usually be the main drum sound.
So, typically I will then go back to the bass guitar and guitar tracks...and really drop out those frequencies with eq. Of course, hopefully that shouldn't change the guitars or bass guitar sound too much (it usually doesn't). Another thing I've used along with this is to actually make a copy of the bass drum track (if your using a digital editor). Now you have two tracks of the bass drum...you will have to reduce the volume levels on both of them, however, you will get a much seemingly stronger sound without getting mushy by adding too much eq or anything. I dunno...I've really found this to work for me.
Clearing out eq zones in the other instruments usually does the trick though.
That's the oldest trick in the book.
All the great mastering engineers do it. I remember reading up on this one guy who gets incredible masters by lining up the same song in two separate CD players, then he just hits play at exactly the same time on both players and records it.
The sound is supposed to be amazing.
I'm thinking of designing a plugin that mimics this technique. I'm thinking of calling it something like "amplitude," or "volume" or something along those lines. Not sure, but it's gonna' be revolutionary.
All the great mastering engineers do it. I remember reading up on this one guy who gets incredible masters by lining up the same song in two separate CD players, then he just hits play at exactly the same time on both players and records it.
The sound is supposed to be amazing.
I'm thinking of designing a plugin that mimics this technique. I'm thinking of calling it something like "amplitude," or "volume" or something along those lines. Not sure, but it's gonna' be revolutionary.