Cool drum mixing idea or waste of time?

[Greg_L]

I hate to defend the guys, but Nickelback consistently churns out great hard rock mixes. Say what you will about the material, their engineers are spectacular. :lol:

(I do kind of dig the first album)

That quantized, sample replaced, autotuned, and digitized modern sterile commercial radio rock garbage aint my thing. I don't care how "good" it sounds.

 

[kcearl]

no.................

 

[Terra]

yeah its called parallel compression, just with effects, i've never tried it, does it give the drums a more full sound?

 

[nate_dennis]

I dunno. Try it. That's the cool thing about recording; you get to experiment. If it sucks . . . you now have one more thing you know doesn't work!!!

 

[sam humans]

i do this all the time with an ampex atr 700 2 track tape machine. bounce a good stereo take to tape, hitting it hard, and then back into the machine. mix with raw drum tracks to taste. viola! tape compression sounds great! or if your on a good mixer with a few subgroups, assign the drums to 1/2, insert comp on 1/2, mix underneath raw tracks.

 

[rightroad1]

awesome on bass

 

[Eric Peterson]

Kudos to the OP for experimenting and discovering this great technique on his own.

THAT'S how interesting records get made: Passionate fader jockeys and knob twiddlers getting their hands dirty creatively sculpting the sound.

Keep up the good work!

 

[Potsy24]

+1000

Back on topic, I was wondering... rather than creating separate copies of the drum tracks, wouldn't it be easier (and essentially equivalent) to set up an FX/send (Cubase lingo) with the compressor on it, then fine tune the compressed/dry mix using the FX return fader on the drum track?

Yes, this is exactly how I do it. I use aux sends to a compressor in Sonar, compress the hell out of it, then do some high and low shelving. Then mix that with the original tracks just until I can hear a difference. If you set the aux sends to "post fader", then you can adjust the volume of the drum tracks without changing the balance between the dry and wet tracks. I do this with almost every mix. This has to be the best mixing trick I've ever found.