Drum Mixing Part 1 (Getting Organised and Balancing Levels)
Greetings, For this mixing process, I'm going to be choosing Belmonte as the track to push my mixing capabilities. This track caught my attention the most as it has a sort of Led Zeppelin rock and roll vibe to it. Hopefully by the end of this I'll be able to enhance my skills if not, learn to.
Getting Organised:
It is essential to segregate and tidy things up a little before I even begin mixing. When I first opened the Logic file, there were tracks scattered everywhere. Although I could mix with this layout, it isn't necessarily ideal.
To organise things, I begin by grouping certain tracks together according to their instrument type and put them into a track stack by selecting 'Create Track Stack' from the 'Track' window.
After grouping the tracks into a track stack, I renamed them according to their instrument type.
By doing this to all the tracks, it makes things look more pleasing to to the eye.
I then opened the mixer and started colour coding tracks in the same folder.
Compared to before, the track now looks so much more neater and easier to work with.
Since I'm only going to mix the drums, I'm going to engage 'Hide View' by pressing 'H'. By doing so, a 'H' symbol will appear on the tracks.
From there, all I've got to do is select the tracks that I want to hide by clicking the 'H' symbol. And when I deactivate Hide View, it should look like this:
I've also created auxiliary strips for each instrument just in case I would want to make some quick final volume changes.
After getting myself organised, it's time to do some basic level adjustments as you can see here that the drum tracks are clipping.
To start off, I added a gain plugin to all of the drum tracks.
After that, I went through all the drum tracks one by one and adjusted the gain. I noted that different parts of the drum will have different levels of gain. For the hi-hat, I reduced the gain by 6.6 dB, the outer kick by 4.9 dB, the inner kick by 6.8 dB, the overhead tracks by 10 to 13 dB, snare by 6.8, and the toms by 8 to 10 dB. As this project has multiple room mic tracks, the amount of gain that I reduced can vary from 7 dB to 9 dB.
Here's how the drum tracks sound altogether so far after some balancing:
That's all from me today, I've managed to decrease and balance the overall volume of the drums, allowing some more head room without clipping. Thank you so much for your attention and as usual, your feedback is much appreciated.
Getting Organised:
It is essential to segregate and tidy things up a little before I even begin mixing. When I first opened the Logic file, there were tracks scattered everywhere. Although I could mix with this layout, it isn't necessarily ideal.
To organise things, I begin by grouping certain tracks together according to their instrument type and put them into a track stack by selecting 'Create Track Stack' from the 'Track' window.
After grouping the tracks into a track stack, I renamed them according to their instrument type.
By doing this to all the tracks, it makes things look more pleasing to to the eye.
I then opened the mixer and started colour coding tracks in the same folder.
Compared to before, the track now looks so much more neater and easier to work with.
Since I'm only going to mix the drums, I'm going to engage 'Hide View' by pressing 'H'. By doing so, a 'H' symbol will appear on the tracks.
From there, all I've got to do is select the tracks that I want to hide by clicking the 'H' symbol. And when I deactivate Hide View, it should look like this:
Balancing Levels:
After getting myself organised, it's time to do some basic level adjustments as you can see here that the drum tracks are clipping.
To start off, I added a gain plugin to all of the drum tracks.
After that, I went through all the drum tracks one by one and adjusted the gain. I noted that different parts of the drum will have different levels of gain. For the hi-hat, I reduced the gain by 6.6 dB, the outer kick by 4.9 dB, the inner kick by 6.8 dB, the overhead tracks by 10 to 13 dB, snare by 6.8, and the toms by 8 to 10 dB. As this project has multiple room mic tracks, the amount of gain that I reduced can vary from 7 dB to 9 dB.
Here's how the drum tracks sound altogether so far after some balancing:
That's all from me today, I've managed to decrease and balance the overall volume of the drums, allowing some more head room without clipping. Thank you so much for your attention and as usual, your feedback is much appreciated.
Comments
Post a Comment