Drums and Compression

[Southwest_Statistic]

I know I'm gonna start something here about the "Loudness Race/War", but whatever. My style and sound is hard, lots of crash, distorted guitar, and loud banging on everything, so I personally am not really loosing anything by compressing the final mix.

Anyway, I was having this issue where when I ran the compressor over the final mix, I was loosing alot of the bass drum and snare. This was very annoying to me, seeing as how the drums make up half the feel of my music. This left me with 2 options in my mind. Deal with crappy drum volume, or reduce the compression so much it hurt my rocker image.

Finally I realized that I could run a distortion filter on the drum track about 0.2 db under the compressors limit point and clip the top edges of the bass drum and snare before it entered the compressor. I think it works awesome. I had to run an EQ over the bass drum to get rid of the > 4000hz pops from the distortion, but thats it. Yay. Don't know why I didn't think of it before.

First 30 seconds are before drum distortion, last 30 seconds are after. <a href="http://www.brusscom.com/distorted_drums_demo.mp3" target="_blank">To download "distorted_drums_demo.mp3", Right-Click THIS link, then Click "Save Target As..." or "Save Link As..."</a>.

[Adam!]

Try hard limiting those drums. You basically are hard limiting those drums, except because of the clipping your limiting ratio is probably a billion to 1. If you hard limit them not only will you get the same effect without the pops, you can probably put your limiting level at -2 or -3 db without hurting the drum mix, which means your drums can be 2 or 3 db louder overall. Or if you prefer the saturated overdriven sound you could check out some plugins that do the same thing, like Anteres Tube or Steinberg's Magneto.

I recommend hard limiting every instrument in a rock mix: you'll be amazed how loud you can get without ever having to touch mastering compression. I hate mastering compression and I try to only use a light multiband compressor on the final mix these days, but I think my songs can get pretty loud because I limit all the peaks before I ever mix the whole thing down.

[Southwest_Statistic]

Oh I do, for things like vocals and organic instruments such as acoustic guitar and chello. For my electric guitars and my bass guitar I direct-line a clean signal into the PC, and run each guitar and bass track through an <a href="http://www.amplitube.com/" target="_blank">AmpliTube</a> vurtual amp. AmpliTube makes the output pretty constant without the need for any added compression on those instruments.

[jb]

Spelling nazi is giving you a citation for the following violations:

Spelling "losing" as "loosing"
Spelling "cello" as "chello"

Please be more cautious in the future, and remember to turn off all cell phones while posting.

[Adam!]

I was loosing alot of the bass drum and snare.

Spelling nazi is giving you a citation for the following violations: Spelling "losing" as "loosing"

Are you saying you can't make an instrument loose? I sure hope you can; I've been told my bass is uncomfortably tight. Also maybe it's a long shift for this particular grammar Gestapo, but the "alot" right after "loosing" was overlooked. Tsk tsk.

Puce, Padant-for-Hire

[Future Boy]

Is it possible for a bass to be uncomfortably tight?

[john82]

i think putting distortion on drums sounds terrible - it's just adds plain noise and doesn't do anything good for the drum track or the whole mix, especially if the mix is full of distortion already.
Johnny from guitars101