Grouping drums together and compressing them

[Nephew]

Did some Google searches and found a few articles and tutorials on this, but nothing really useful. Do you guys know of any good tutorials on this subject, or have any advice to off yourselves? Looking to polish my mixes off that much more and this is something I've been meaning to look into and work on.

Cheers guys and thanks again!

[Moody]

Look into side bus compression or NY style compression, then experiment with it. I find the harder you compress the bussed signal the better, then mix to taste.

[bosonHavoc]

read watch all you can, lots of info and lots of different ways to do it.

for me though i spend most of my time getting the volumes, pans and Eq right

i'll solo out the drum group or sometimes i even have to make an entire set just for drums, depending how cpu intensive i'm getting with effects.

following the digital mixing rule of thumb peaks between -6 and -4
thats what i shoot for on the group bus.

for panning
kick is always dead center
then the rest i either use drummer perspective or audience perspective.
ie pretend your the drummer and pan the pieces of the kit where they would be positioned around your ears.
eq out the freq's you do not need for each piece of the kit
set volumes so its balanced

then from their you drums should be balanced and you can use the group bus fader to adjust the drums to the rest of the song.
since i use mostly sampled drums i don't find i need to compress unless its for effect.
don't get caught up in the compression.. allot of times you only need a little or none at all,
especially when working with professionally sampled drums or even samples of a record.

[necho]

or you can try mixing the drums into a compressor...

stick a compressor on the bus and tweak the levels of the individual drum tracks.

this works well if you're using quite extreme compression settings.

[dj_blueprint]

Group all your drum tracks, use eq8 for each individual track within the group, use multiband compression-eq8-and a final compressor on the master group bus and then mix it with the rest of your track.

[mihai]

i usually don't toss anything on my drum group, buss out sure.

[cubehog]

Beware of compressor issues. In the last months I rather turn up the volume and let the drums "stick out of the mix". Then I do subgroup mastering with a compressor which has dry/wt knob.
There seems to be a more distinguishable, clearer result in the mastering process.

Try this, instead of just using the compressor/limiter combo.

Compressors can have a sound too, so that´s certainly no general rule, just my (maybe useless) observation.

der ivo

[Nephew]

Thanks for the input guys, been messing with the SSL 4000 G series compressor, but then I read an article suggesting using a multiband compressor so I went with Linear Phase Multiband and found that just adjusting the Range setting and subtle adjustments on the Gain settings (+/- 2db max) was give me the best feeling.

I've known about NY compression, but I can never get it to sounds "right". Thanks for the insight once again guys! Much appreciated!

[Nephew]

But I did try out the API2500, and while it didn't work well on the drums for me, I slapped it on the master channel with some soft settings and it made a world of difference, just glued everything together perfectly.

[bishbo2000]

I like to group them all on a group channel, hats, kick, snare ...the lot.

Then compress using ratio about 1.3, attack 10ms or so and release depending on the track, prob about 50ms.

The idea is that the kick will flatten the other elements (especially the snare) and tie them all together. Works for me. Give it a go. Its quite subtle but def works.

If you have shakers or a long hat continually repeating its nice to get it to pump with a bit of sidechain compression, dont overdo it, if you need to know theres heaps of tutorials on sidechaining.

Hasta...

[nuxnamon]

I usually sum the drums OTB using a summing box into a ubk fatso to glue and then thru a tube mic pre and back to the daw. Was gonna get the API 2500 cuz it's so versatile but went with the modded fatso because it actually has some great compressor settings plus the warmth off course. It's basically a hardware compressor with presets to cover a wide range with some limited but useful controls. Great on drums.