With a fantastic drummer, kick and snare will still benefit from a little bit of compression. Even just a dB or 2 of gain reduction at a ratio can sound incredible.
Keep in mind that a ratio of retains the most punch because it acts on transients less. With such minimal compression going on, the actual setup of the compressor is less crucial.
When you need the kick and snare to be aggressive and cut through, more compression does the trick. Somewhere in the range of dB of gain reduction is a good place to aim. For heavier drum compression, the attack time is one of the most important parameters. Drums have a lot of really fast transients in the kick and snare.
The key is to experiment with attack and even ratio to highlight transients rather than pushing them down. There are two basic means of going about setting the release time on kick and snare. The first is to set it super fast, which adds density to the drums by bringing up the low-level details like hit decays.
Home Tips and Tricks. This is the second article in a series on mixing drums. This one covers drum compression, while a previous article covered Drum EQ Tips. Despite all that EQing, the drums are still not moving you. Most modern mixes are aching for a punchy drum sound and this goal can be achieved with the right kind of compression. Getting the sound right at the source, though, is paramount to achieving your goal. It helps to start with a great drummer, great drums, a great-sounding room, and great recording techniques.
This can make the pulse of the track feel inconsistent, eating at your groove and making the drums less solid. Important Note : Whenever setting up compression, make use of the make-up gain knob on your processor. This control provides a way to maintain a consistent volume when comparing processed to unprocessed signals. This allows you to hear exactly what your settings are doing to the sound. Without the correct makeup gain, you can be fooled into thinking that the louder signal usually the uncompressed one sounds better.
Plugins that have auto-gain options such as the free MeldaProductions MCompressor or the Izotope Neutron 3 compressor module spare you the headache of having to set up the make-up gain yourself. Both compressor types can be set to have very fast attack and release, and they can color the sound in pleasant ways if driven hard. As an aside, sometimes the easiest way to increase or decrease the attack and sustain of your tracks is to use a transient designer , which is not a compressor and therefore will not be discussed here.
When compressing a well-played and well-recorded drum sound you might only need 1 or 2dB of gain reduction and a low ratio.
The easiest way to set up your attack time and release time is to start with a slow attack and medium release time. Try starting with ms attack and release. Slowly i ncrease the attack time until you start losing the impact of the transient and the drum starts feeling less bright or punchy. Now slow the attack until you bring back the initial attack of the drum. On a digital compressor, like the Avid DynamicsIII, an attack between 11ms and 25ms usually seems natural.
Too fast an attack will make the drum sound less punchy, regardless of what the gain reduction meter shows you. On the other hand, a fast attack will provide you with more control over the sound. Next, move the release as slow as it goes and increase the release time until the compressor starts to move in time with the song. Too slow a release will just keep the volume of the drum soft all the time, and an overly fast release will let the body of the drum come up too fast.
The compressor should be finished releasing before the next big hit comes along. With this much compression, you really start hearing your compressor working and its attack, release, and ratio settings become very important. Set the release time so that the compressor releases before the next kick. Increasing the ratio will make the kick even punchier. Quicker release times may increase the sense of ambience around the drum, so try some shorter times to hear what fits your groove.
Extremely short release times can create distortion artifacts, which can be ugly or appropriate depending on your style of music. If your snare is too dark, instead of boosting the high-end with an EQ, try using compression. This works well if we take similar settings as we did when compressing for player dynamics, but turn the ratio way up or turn the threshold way down or both. Suddenly the compressor starts to move and react to the drums in a unique way.
We can create an audible swelling effect that restructures the rhythm and completely changes the vibe of the track. Fun things start happening when we work on the extremes of a compressor.
Setting the attack and release as fast as possible, using the highest ratios, and really digging in until the compressor starts to feel a little pain can add some serious bite and energy to the sound. Some compressors can be truly overdriven and create modulation distortion, which is distortion that occurs because the attack and release are happening within the speed of the waveform itself. The with all of the ratio buttons pushed in, the Eventide Omnipressor , and Spectrasonics all exhibit this quality.
The break up adds a really fun distortion that sounds great on dark, aggressive, or gritty sounding records. Train Your Ears Become a Member. Search for:. Articles Mixing Recording Producing Mastering. Share Tweet.
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