Buses and Bouncing down tracks for drums

Z

Zach Frazier

New member
How important is it to bounce down a drum mix for the mastering phase. And also what is the importance of making buses for recorded drums. Just a brief description and how it can improve or hurt the mix is all I am looking for. I think I have a good understanding of the mixing phase, when it comes to the mastering phase I get lost.
 
I believe so but from what I have gathered from watching videos and reading they seems the same when using buses and bouncing a track down. I am really don't know the difference. But I have also read that you shouldn't overload a track with to many plugins and that is why you should use buses and inputs over stereo tracks. I don't know I am so lost when it comes to setting up a multi track of recorded drums that are mixed and preparing it for the mastering phase. Any help would be awesome.
 
Well, I'm not as versed in this stuff as many of the guys on here, but I don't bounce the drums together. I tried it once, but I couldn't see a benefit to it (unless you're running out of tracks and you need to free some up). If you don't bus the drums you can EQ each drum individually, and raise/lower the volumes of individual drums.

One thing to note is that I don't compress my tom tracks. That's just out of laziness, I know they sound better compressed. I just compress the snare and the kick. If you have all the drums on one track compression would be a snap, I suppose.
 
Have you got a link to something you recorded? I'm curious to hear how the drums sound. I'm new at this myself and I've been constantly tweaking the things I've been doing, apparently in pursuit of the perfect recorded drum sound.
 
There is no need to bounce the drums down to a stereo track.

Sending the drums to a buss makes it easier to adjust the drums as a whole. It also makes it so you can compress the drums as a whole.

Neither is necessary to get a good result.
 
Are you using a stand-alone recorder with limited number of tracks?

You don't 'master' a portion of a finished project (like the drums), the whole mixed project (typically mixed to a stereo track) is mastered.

You send all drum tracks to a buss to add the same plugin/FX to the whole project at one time (for example EQ or reverb).
 
I was in a hurry when I posted before.

Are you talking about mixing or mastering. Mastering is usually done to an entire project (or a finished song, if it is a single), mixing is when you take all the elements of a song and mix them together.

There is no need to mix the drums to a single file, unless you have a limited number of tracks and need to free up space.

With drums, I normally EQ, compress and gate each track individually and use an aux send from the individual tracks for reverb. Then I send all the drum tracks to a buss and compress there as well. Most of the time I keep the overheads out of that buss, because I tend to squash the crap out of the drums. So I have a separate buss that has the overheads, hat and ride mic in it.

Sometimes I route the output of the drum reverb into the drum buss, so that it is compressed with the drums.
 
As of right now I am only recording drum covers. I have a total of 7 tracks that are all sent to a master track. I will go through each individual track and use EQ, Compression, Reverb, and a gate on the tracks that need them. For the master track I will use Compression, Reverb, Maxim, And bomb factory bf76. I found by using these plugins on the master track it will bring up the sound of my recording. But I feel that I am totally doing all of this wrong. Any help on areas that can be corrected would be awesome because I feel I am approaching this was wrong and this is why I am struggling on getting the sound I am looking for. Also another question I have is, while recording what is a good level for my faders to be at? I've read and heard that -6db is a good level to record at, or near that area. Also would it be better to use my faders in the pro tools mixer to achieve these levels, or to use the gain knobs on my Tascam US-1800 to adjust the levels that are recorded. Sorry if any of this is super unclear. If you get lost while trying to explain any ideas you have just let me know and I will try and clear this up.
 
Zach Frazier said:
As of right now I am only recording drum covers. I have a total of 7 tracks that are all sent to a master track. I will go through each individual track and use EQ, Compression, Reverb, and a gate on the tracks that need them. For the master track I will use Compression, Reverb, Maxim, And bomb factory bf76.
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The only thing I would do differently is using one reverb on a aux send, instead of several instances on individual tracks.

Zach Frazier said:
I found by using these plugins on the master track it will bring up the sound of my recording. But I feel that I am totally doing all of this wrong. Any help on areas that can be corrected would be awesome because I feel I am approaching this was wrong and this is why I am struggling on getting the sound I am looking for.
Click to expand...
You really aren't doing anything wrong. You may be overprocessing, but it's hard to tell without hearing what you are doing.


Zach Frazier said:
Also another question I have is, while recording what is a good level for my faders to be at? I've read and heard that -6db is a good level to record at, or near that area. Also would it be better to use my faders in the pro tools mixer to achieve these levels, or to use the gain knobs on my Tascam US-1800 to adjust the levels that are recorded. Sorry if any of this is super unclear. If you get lost while trying to explain any ideas you have just let me know and I will try and clear this up.
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The faders in protools have nothing to do with recording level. That is set on the mic preamp/interface. You can leave the faders at unity.

For drums, -6 on the input meters in your DAW is a good place to shoot for.
 
Zach Frazier said:
I've read and heard that -6db is a good level to record at, or near that area. Also would it be better to use my faders in the pro tools mixer to achieve these levels, or to use the gain knobs on my Tascam US-1800 to adjust the levels that are recorded.
Click to expand...

These are different points in the chain and would be adjusted for different reasons.

Starting a session you'd leave the PT faders at unity and forget about them.

Use the gain knob on your interface to get a signal that's loud enough for background noise/interference not to be heard, but low enough that your converters aren't clipped.
There is a limit to what they can take.


One all the recording is done, the ProTools faders are there for mixing.
If you recorded too hot or too low the PT faders will not fix the problem.
At this stage you're mixing several healthy tracks together so the Master meters are your point of reference.
Again, make sure the sum of the parts doesn't clip the master track. Leave some room!


Also, don't jump ahead.
There's no point having heavy limiters and compressors on while you're mixing.
Keep your master track empty and use it as an overall mix volume reference.

Once you're completely finished mixing you'd take a look at mastering although I guess it does no harm to test a limiter on the master once in a while just to see how your mix would play out with it, especially if you're inexperience with that kind of thing like me. :p

Hope that helps.
 
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