One-Minute Drum Mixing Tutorial

Our One-Minute Mixing/Mastering Series of articles have been some of our most popular articles to date. So this month we are continuing with One-Minute Drum Mixing. To emphasize once again, getting a really good mix of drums will take you more than one minute. But if there is only a minute to mix, or someone wanted to make a quick mix for a quick reference, here's a step-by-step on what to do.

First, some preliminaries. Let's a assume one has recorded with a fairly standard and simple four microphone drum recording setup:
- Condenser matched Stereo Pair for overheads (L & R) (On the top end, the SE4 pair are recommended or the M-Audio Pulsar II Pair for half the price)
- Dynamic mic on kick (the AKG D112 is a standard mic or the Audio Technica ATM 250 for a tighter sound
- Dynamic mic on snare (the new AKG D5 sounds great)
With decent mics and good positioning you can achieve an excellent recorded source with just four mics. Adding more microphones can bring more mixing flexibility, but can also increase the chance of phasing. And always remember this equation for success: good source sound + good mic selection and placement = much easier mixing

Now for the Mixing step-by-step:

1. Create a stereo group or sub-mix called "drums" in your DAW (5 seconds if you know how to do it, but this will take longer if you have to look it up for your particular program)
2. Pull all 4 drum track volumes down to nothing and route the outputs into the group "drums" (5 seconds)
3. Kick Drum: Insert a compressor on the kick drum track. Put the ratio to around 4:1. Bring the kick volume up to around unity on the mixer (usually says 0) and pull up the make-up gain on the compressor until it is just starting to grab the kick and it has a solid gut or chest punch. (10 seconds)
4. Snare Drum: Insert an EQ on the Snare Drum Track and make a high pass filter starting at around 200hz. (Basically use the EQ to take out anything below 200hz). This will help focus on the snare and take much of the Kick out of the snare mic. Bring the gain level up to about where it sounds balanced with the kick. On the EQ you can also bump up a little of the frequencies at around 5kHz for an increase in the crisp sound of the snare, 10kHz for more of a snap, and somewhere between for a combination. Pan the snare about 1/3 to 1/2 way to the right. As a final touch, insert a plate reverb on the track and give the snare just a enough to make it linger. (20 seconds)
5. Overheads: Pan the Left hard left and the Right hard right. Put a high pass EQ on each of them at about 100Hz to leave the proper kick channel lots of frequency room. Bring both channels up into the mix until it fills out the sound to taste. (15 seconds)
6. Add a room or hall reverb onto the drum group and add just enough of the wet/dry mix to taste (don't overdue it, in one of our favourite reverbs, the UAD Real Verb Pro plug-in included in all UAD-2 cards, I usually don't take the wet mix above 5%). (5 seconds)

You can take these same principals, use a little more time and get an even better sound out of the drums. But if time is of the essence, we hope this one-minute drum mix will help.