I think I must be mixing my drums wrong. (Links to samples)

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Eurythmic

Eurythmic

majordomo plasticomo
Hey everyone! Been a while. :)

Since the forum is always my first source when I hit a wall, there's a question I've got to ask you all.

I can't get good drum sounds. Here's the big question: Am I limited by my equipment, or can I be doing more to improve my mixes? I've picked three examples. All are really short, just over 300k apiece. But that's enough to give you all an idea of what I'm talking about. Sorry about the fade-outs; for some reason, my wave editor just can't do a fade-out without adding a pop. I have no idea why. It definitely encourages me to find legitimate endings for my songs, at least! :)

My problem is that I just can't seem to get any power or presence whatsoever out of my drum sounds. I mainly use soundfonts, and while the samples sound nice on their own, they don't seem to do anything inside a mix. This is what leads me to believe that I'm doing something wrong - I figure that while four megabytes of sample memory is nothing by today's standards, lots of artists have gotten great drum sounds with far less. Right?

Take this first example: It's from a cover of "Take On Me", originally by A-Ha. Now, they were obviously using a drum machine on this song. And I picked samples that sounded an awful lot like A-Ha's, but in the mix they just have no pep!


Now here's one from an original song, called "Taped". My backing track for this song isn't complete yet, but I'm worried about the drums. I'm going for a really powerful sound, sort of like "Haunted" by Poe, if any of you have heard that. I'm using a combination of a pre-performed drum loop and a few OPL3 augmentations. But it comes off sounding totally lite rock.


Last, a sample from a little one-off piece of mine called "Ubermensch". It was my fun attempt to be Trent Reznor for a day. :) But here, the guitars are providing all the bite. The drums are completely flat.


So, do you hear what I'm talking about here? While I think I do get pretty good sounds with my other instruments and synths, the drums really hold the tracks back and make them sound unprofessional. Right now I'm mainly just trying to make the highest quality demos that I can - I'll never release any of these recordings - but I do want to continue to improve as a home recorder and I think that drum sounds are my weakest point. Any advice would definitely be appreciated.
 
The drums in "one" sound pretty good. Whats with the clicking or echo during the fills?

The drums for 2 and 3 do sound weak. I don't think your gonna get away from that too much being that they are soundfonts.

Try screwing around with eq, maybe try some upward expansion with a compressor..
 
Brokenwindow: Thanks for listening!

Okay. With number one, I was just linking together little one-bar pre-performed drum loops. So what you're hearing might be a tempo mistake on my part, but it sounds fairly smooth to me, so I'm pretty sure it's the OPL3 percussion you're talking about - do you mean the 16th and 32nd notes that go quickly hard right, then hard left? I thought it might make the track a little more edgy to add some extra percussion sounds that aren't so drenched in reverb. You don't like it? (I know, it's a little hard to tell from a 20-odd second sample... :) )

For two and three, here's the thing I don't get. Well, take the A-Ha song for instance. Keep in mind, I know zero about drum machines. I want to learn, but as yet I haven't really had the cash lying around to experiment... but on a low budget debut album, released 16 years ago, what could they possibly have used for their drums that's better than what I've got now? I know the drums were programmed, not performed. And yet, I can't come close to that sound... You know, this question would probably be more appropriate in a different forum. :)

Back to the subject at hand - Do you have any EQ suggestions? I do compress my drum tracks a little bit, but I'm still fairly clueless when it comes to EQ. Most of my EQ adjustments to the percussion tracks end up boosting the volume, but not really doing a lot to the character of the sound. It would be nice to have some better starting points.

Any more advice would be appreciated!
 
hey,

I was able to listen to 1 and two. three would not play.

Man, I thought that the mixing was really good.

The drums sounded kinda plasticy , but if you had not mentioned it, they would not have bothered me one bit.

I basically think that the drums need more lowest end. Maybe around 40-60 hz. MAybe a little less compression. THat might be tricky though, cos I suspect that they are already compressed in the soundfonts.

But hold you head up. Your stuff sounds very pleasing.
 
Cyan -
Hey, thanks for the compliments! I'll give your suggestions a try.

What are you playing your mp3s with? I'm guessing it's not Winamp, or possibly it's an old version... I encoded those mp3s in variable bitrate, and your player must have just averaged all those numbers together.

I actually thought that even older mp3 players supported variable bitrate. I'll have to remember that in the future.
 
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