Hey what’s up guys, David Glenn: davidglennrecording.com, mixingvocals.com and theproaudiofiles.com.
I’ve been asked several times in the last couple of months, how are you mixing your
toms.
And I’ve got a training course out there for The Mix Series which takes us through
the rough mix.
I’ve got one called Mixing Vocals which will take you through all kinds of vocals
and so the one thing I don’t have out there yet is mixing the music and the band, and
the drums, bass, whatever — I’m actually working on that right now, that’ll be released
— probably already released by the time you’re watching this video.
But be sure to check out davidglennrecording.com for all those updates.
But anyways, back to the question was, how in the world are you mixing your toms.
And a lot of the time the questions come in from the producers I’m working with, they’re
saying, hey man, how did you take, did you replace, did you — what are you doing.
And sometimes yes the answer I’ll replace them and I’ll use, whatever, the Slate,
CLA Bundle has some cool toms, That Sound has some great sounding toms.
All kinds of great sampled toms out there.
But when I can, I’m for not having to go through and cycle through and listen to a
bunch of different sounds that I — you know, I just want to pull open and listen to what
they gave me.
And in this case it was a pretty dramatic sound.
And one of my buddies asked me, man can you just, can you cover it, can you do a video.
So we’re gonna do a video.
I’m gonna show you the before and after and then we’re gonna hear it in the mix
and make sure that even though I did a bunch of processing to it, does it work.
So here we go, before, just the toms.
And now it probably goes to — it’s important to say — these it sounds like these were
done with a VI virtual instrument, maybe Superior or BFD, no idea, don’t know the producer
in this case but we’ll take a listen and makes it a little bit easier to control the
bleed and things like that whenever they’re already sampled.
So here we go.
[toms before processing]
Ok, this is not gonna be fair to those toms, let’s boost the volume and see what we get.
Ok, so nothing crazy.
And real quick we’ll put my processing in and then I’ll walk you step by step through
it.
[toms after processing]
Ok, so pretty dramatic difference.
The first thing up was very simple EQ.
I took a little bit of the, you know, 6 to 800ish kind if range there.
I felt like for whatever reason those particular toms, I just copied that down.
A lot of times I’ll EQ each tom individually, but in this case I just kind of rushed, excuse
me for being lazy.
Then those go into the virtual channel VCC, nothing crazy there.
Set to the SSL.
Then I wanted a lot more top end in the mix.
I felt like they weren’t clicky enough so I boosted that.
Just kind of trial and error.
Working my way through.
Now this is a preset that I got from, man where did I get this, C4, the Waves C4 has
a preset and I think it was floor tom 1 or something in there.
If you cycle through, if you guys have the Waves C4, C6 it might’ve been, go ahead
and cycle through some of those tom presets because this is pretty much a duplicate of
that preset.
And it’s doing all kinds of stuff, sometimes I bypass this just to see what’s going on,
but honestly I’m mixing into it for the most part and I like what it’s doing man.
So probably the easiest way to explain this one is for you to pause the video, look at
my settings, try it out for yourself and see if it’s working for you.
I’ll click through a couple of these bands real quick so you can see what’s going on.
But like I said, this is pretty much a duplicate of the preset from the Waves C6 floor tom
1 I believe.
You’ll see it, looks pretty exactly like that.
And then you got in the Waves menu.
So moving on from that, we’ve got the Alloy 2.
Now this one is big for me because I love to remove sustain from the low end so that
I get a nice solid, call it a thump, but a solid hit in the low end.
This right here is giving attack and cutting sustain for 150 to 200Hz and below.
And that works out really well for controlling sustain.
Especially when I’ve got live toms that just ring forever.
Sometimes that sustain is dropped all the way down and instead of gating them all I
use this.
The attack in the mids, no big deal there.
Cutting some sustain from that.
And then this is also gonna boost that high end that I boosted here on the Pro-Q 2, right
there in the 4275.4 Hz.
That is gonna be enhanced with the Alloy 2’s attack for 2K and above.
So that boost at 3.4, the attack, and then cutting some of the sustain even is gonna
help it be a little bit more clicky and cut through the mix.
And then a big part of this, believe it or not, is this Studer.
Now the Studer A800, I’m driving this — sometimes I’m driving this for distortion, sometimes
I’m driving it to get that character.
In this case I think I’m holding off just before it goes to distortion.
Let’s take a listen and then I’ll bypass this one and you can hear it.
[toms before Studer A800 Tape Plugin]
Cool, now without it.
[toms after Studer A800 Tape Plugin]
So obviously there’s a lot going on there.
It’s as simple as this, it’s a drum buss preset with the noise turned off and then
I’m driving the input and correcting the output however I want it to be.
Sometimes when I’m mixing instead of reaching for the volume I’ll come over here to the
output and that’s how I’ll control the final output from there.
But usually I drive that pretty hard, you can hear the fullness that that obtains from
driving it.
One more time.
[toms with Studer A800]
Pretty insane.
And let’s go back and maybe bypass one at a time.
We’ll hear it.
Kind of the starting point.
[toms + FabFilter Pro-Q 2]
Give that clicky attack.
Here’s the multiband.
[toms + FabFilter Pro-MB Multiband Compressor]
Kind of neat.
Then some more of the transient designer.
Very cool, nice and choppy.
And then the beastly A800 from UAD, the Studer.
Kind of finishing us off there.
So now I told you we’d check it in the mix to make sure.
It’s not gonna be fair to turn these off and leave it at the same volume, so let’s
go ahead and boost this guy back up.
Let’s hear it in the mix.
[toms in the mix with/without processing]
Cool, that’d be a good spot, put the volume back and hear what it’s doing now.
Cool, so you be the judge, let me know in the comments what you think.
Don’t forget to send me emails for more tutorials: david@davidglennrecording.com,
the glenn has two n’s.
Mixingvocals.com and theproaudiofiles.com.
We’ll catch you again soon.