5 Tips for Better Drum Sounds

Professionals get pro results because of their skills, but also because of their habits. In this blog post, I'm going to show you five things that I do every time I walk up to mix a new drum kit.

Hey! If you're new here, my name is James and I help church sound techs save the day by eliminating distractions in church audio.

Get Out From Behind the Console

The very first thing I like to do when I'm mixing a drum kit is actually walk up to the drums. Yes, you have to leave the confines of your nice, well-protected sound booth and walk up on stage. Don't worry, nothing is going to blow up while you're away from the soundboard. But you have to get on stage to do two things. The first thing is that I check my mic placement. If you want ideas for mic placement and you can hear some different examples of it. I've got a video about that up HERE. Seriously, you have to get out from behind that soundboard and take the steps to go up on stage. Do you have a bunch of stairs you have to climb? Too bad. It'll be good for your heart and you'll get to burn off that extra donut that you had.

Where Should You Place Your Microphones?

So once we get to the drum kit, we have steps one and two. We're going to check the mic placement, and then we're going to listen to the drummer actually play the drums. I already know what I'm wanting when it comes to mic placement, so I don't have to spend a lot of time doing A-B tests in mic placement connoisseuring.

It doesn't take much time to get the snare mic and the tom mics in place. A lot of times the drummers will point it at the drum and that might be fine, or it might be something that I really don't like and will want to change. Don't forget to talk to the drummer when you're doing this. After all, you are invading their safe space. Just tell them, “Hey, I like the drum mics this way most of the time. If we hate it, we can always change it back!”

In general, you point the back of the microphone at the closest cymbal and point the mic at the drum. This is not rocket science. I like to keep the mic capsule over the rim of the drum, which keeps it from getting hit, and it gives a nice balance of the shell tone and the head tone. It just seems to work. I've got my go-to spots for mics on the kick drum too, but what I'm really most concerned about is that nothing is touching the resonant head on the drum. I mean, you can't recreate low end that's not there. And remember, it's all about the low end. When you get that right, everything else falls into place. For the overheads, I tend to pull the ride-side microphone a little bit back further away from the front  of the drum kit.

That makes it a lot easier to keep the snare and the kick drum in the center of the stereo image for the overhead mics. Of course, the mics should pick up the cymbals, so make sure that they're not off in the middle of nowhere.

The last thing I check on the overheads is to make sure that they're about the same distance from the snare drum or even a lug on the snare drum that's closer to the kick drum.

Listen to the Drums Acoustically 

Now the second thing that I'm going to do while I'm by the drum kit is actually listen to the drums, and that requires that the drummer is there. I'm not trying to be nitpicky about the way things are tuned, (although sometimes I might do that) I'm just listening for some glaring things that are jumping out to me that I might hate. Like some weird ring on the tom, or maybe the floor tom rings weirdly when you hit the snare drum. Those are the things I want to find at the source, listening without microphones. Now you should always be concerned about protecting your hearing, so I like to keep a pair of mixing earplugs on me all the time. I like ER-20s by Etymotic Research. They fit in my ears really well, and they bring down things really evenly. So it's not like everything's just muffled and you're getting a higher proportion of low end. It's none of that. It feels really good.

Check The Polarity On Your Mics

Now that we're back at the console, let's talk about step three, the polarity switch. A lot of people skip this step, but I like to check the polarity on my different mics to see which one makes it sound thicker or thinner in different combinations. When you have multiple microphones that are picking up a single sound source, a timing difference between the sound arriving at those microphones creates phase problems or phasing. But it's not always a problem. So when you flip the polarity, you're changing which frequencies combine and boost, and which frequencies cancel out. When I'm pushing these switches in, I'm looking for the better or worse like you do with the eye doctor, and to me, thicker is better. I can always get rid of low end with my high pass filter, but I can't get it back if it's being phase canceled.

Now if you push up your snare drum and you get it nice and fat and then ride up the overheads and it gets thinner, try flipping the polarity on the overheads. If it doesn't get better, you might try to vary the distance that the overheads are from the snare drum. That's another reason why I try to make sure that the mics are the same distance from the snare drum so that their timing relationship is going to be the same. And if nobody's ever told you before, when you use a snare bottle mic, you have to flip the polarity or you're going to eliminate almost all the low end coming from your snare drum.

My Philosophy For Approaching Drum Processing

Step four is processing the drums. Now, I'm not going to go into depth as I do in my other videos that you can check out in this Ultimate Drum Mixing playlist HERE, but I want to talk about the way that I approach processing rather than specific things that I do for processing. A lot of times if there's something that you want out of a drum, there’s more than one way to go about it. If the snare drum needs more crack, you could boost up the top end and put a high shelf on it around 5k. That would get you more crack. But another way to get that is to put on a compressor with a hard knee and a fast attack. This can get you a snappier drum sound as well. So knowing when to take one approach versus another is what separates professionals from amateurs.

Let's imagine your drums aren't sustaining as much as you want them to. You could put on a compressor with a fast attack and a fast release to pull up more of the back-end of those drum sounds, or you could try a reverb that's really short and filtered and push that up to add a little bit more sustain. Both of them are going to get you more sustain on the drums, but their texture's going to be different. And knowing which one to try is just having another tool in your tool belt that can help you to get great sounds every time.

The other part of this is knowing what tool to use that can't be done with something else. For instance, with EQ, I can't use any other tool to do the same things that I can get done by cutting out a bunch of mid-range on the drums if I want it to sound more like rock and roll. When it comes to gating, you can know the difference between gating and expanding setting your threshold just right, or you could look at dampening the drums at the source. So that's what I mean when I'm talking about processing with wisdom. You have multiple ways to look at finding a solution. If I had to sum up this section in one sentence, it would be: know the multiple paths that you can use to get your drums from where they are to where you want them to go.

Exploring Parallel Compression

Step five is one that you might not have tried before, and it's parallel compression. Parallel compression means that you duplicate the channel path going to the stereo bus. On one path it might be uncompressed totally, and on the other one you might compress it heavily, and the combination of both of these can get you some texture and some sound envelopes that you couldn't get just compressing in series. Now before you try this, make sure that you do your other four steps. It's a whole lot easier to clean up things in the right order before you add parallel compression into the mix. I've got a video HERE all about parallel processing, but if you want to get started, the easiest way is to group all your drums into a stereo group and then have another stereo group that you just send the kick and the snare into. Compress this parallel group with just the kick and snare and blend that into your natural drum sounds. If you're on a digital console, you have to look out for latency, so that's why I recommend that you group your drums that are dry and you group your drums that are compressed together. Now on this parallel group, you might realize that your kick drum is pushing into the compression a whole lot more than your snare drum, so you might have to vary the balance of those kick and snare going to the parallel processing group. I mean in live sound, we often have a disproportionate level of the kick drum going to our main mix because we really want to work out those subs and we like to party.

FREE Soundcheck Checklist To Set Your Mix Up For Success

Before we review the five steps that I take to get great drum sounds, I want to tell you about my FREE Soundcheck Checklist. This helps you get everything in order before the band arrives so that you can have an easy time getting your sounds up and making the best mix of your life. The more decisions you take care of before you push up the faders, the easier time you'll have mixing and actually taking care of decisions after the faders are up. Get your copy, print it out, laminate it, and put it by your soundboard!

So to review, step one is getting the mics in the right place. Step two is to listen to the drums acoustically so that you can fix problems before they get into the sound system. Step three is to check the polarity. Remember, we're going for the biggest, deepest drum sounds we can get. Step four is using your processing with wisdom. Know more than one way that you can get to what you need to. And step five is parallel compression because it can get you that extra 10% that you can't get anywhere else.

Remember: it's all about the low end, avoid the sound tech solo, and nobody leaves church humming the kick drum.