Original subtitles

Welcome to my software drum production mini course. If you've struggled getting

your programmed drums to sound real and sound good and sound inspiring, then

this course is going to be right up your alley. The idea of this course is to

walk you through every part of the process in programming, performing,

capturing, and tweaking and mixing the sound of your programmed and software

drums. So this will not touch on electronic drums.

electronic this is going to be acoustic sounding drums so drums that sound like

a real drum kit recorded live that's what this course is there's four main

sections of this course and each section gives you a very specific goal and

something you'll learn along the way number one is thinking like a drummer so

getting in the right mindset before you start recording and committing things to

midi learning how to approach drum programming as an actual drummer would.

is going to give you insane levels of realism and way better overall feel of

your drums. Number two is performing, programming, and editing your MIDI.

So this is the bulk of the execution of getting those drums out there. Part

number three talks all about drum software tweaking and everything you

do within the sample library to make it sound its best and work the way you want

it to. Number four is going to be drum mixing, and so we're going to cover all

of the audio side, EQ and compression, and getting them to actually sound how

they should in the final mix and sit the right way amongst the other

instruments. My goal is to make this course as general as possible, so

I am using Logic Pro and Addictive Drums, I'm going to be bouncing back and

forth between stock drums and library drums just to give you an idea of how

can apply to different drums, different DAWs, different workflows.

So nothing I'm doing is logic specific or addictive drum specific.

The idea here is...

Take the general knowledge and concepts and apply it to your setup and your

learning situation.

If you would like to download all these assets and follow along with me as I go

through the course, I have them all available for purchase on my website.

This course is completely free, so in you purchasing those assets, you're

actually helping me to offset the cost of creating this and provide it to you

free of cost. So thank you for those of you who do go and buy that and help

support me.

With all that said, let's dive into episode one. Lesson one is thinking like

drummer. So mindset before MIDI. Before you even start putting in notes and, you

know, crafting your performance, you need to be able to think like a drummer

behave like a drummer, you know, be the drummer. So the idea of this section is

let you understand kind of how drummers think, how they perform, what are the

limitations that drummers have.

because there's so many instances where I see other people's MIDI that just

doesn't sound real and it's because they're not programming it in a way that

drummer could actually perform it. It's not just, hey, we want to record this in

a way that it can be recreated live. It needs to go the other way in a sense of,

you know, if we want this to sound like a real drummer, it has to be done in the

way that a real drummer would do it. So I have my session here and I have some

bad MIDI in there.

bad MIDI.

I just programmed four different grooves that I thought represented some of the

most common issues in MIDI and mindset type of things that I see. So I'm going

to pop over to the screen and we will play some of it and I'll start to break

down why these grooves aren't working and why a drummer would not.

do this, if that makes sense. Let's hop over to screen and I will show you. So

I'm just going to hit play.

I have two different songs in here, kind of different styles, two different drum

kits loaded up, so there's some variety and just proof of concept that this

works across any genre regardless of... yeah, it just works across the board. So

here's my first example here. Here's the song.

And here's some drums coming.

Okay, these sound okay. This isn't the worst drum thing ever, but this is not

what a drummer would actually do on a number of levels.

So number one, a drummer only has four limbs, right? They have their two arms

and their two legs, their two hands, two feet, and all of your drum patterns and

things that you program need to stay within those four limbs.

I don't know how else to say that. If you have something happening, where they

would need three arms to play it that's that's not it you can't do that same

thing with feet you have a kick pedal and you have a hi -hat pedal that's all

that they can do with their feet start thinking in that mindset so if i pull up

this midi here first of all here's our kick and snare down here and then up

we have some toms but if you'll notice this is a hi -hat here The hi -hat is

still going when the toms happen, and I know this is an issue people do because

I used to do this when I was in a band and then my drummer got mad at me

hey, I can't actually keep playing the cymbal when I'm doing a drum fill.

So let me play it again so you can really hear what I'm saying.

Same thing right here.

A quick, easy way to fix this would just be to pull out that MIDI.

So that way the drummer actually has the hands available to play it.

Same thing here.

Okay, that's the start.

I'll play the next example and we can continue down this process. So here we

Okay, so I'm sure now that I've pointed out the four -limb thing, you'll notice

there's way too much happening here, and there's a lot of issues.

Okay.

Number one, aside from the obvious of, like, we have eight things happening at

once, this is just too busy. It doesn't support the song.

It doesn't sound good.

So what I would actually do is maybe just remove all of these drop fills.

Okay, next thing that's an issue, I do want this fill here.

No, I don't.

Get rid of that.

And now we actually have two cymbals playing here the whole time, so that

be both hands being occupied, so you need to pick between...

where you want the groove to be riding on.

I will get more into how to put together the drum groove in the second episode.

So this is more overview mindset things. So don't get freaked out that you don't

understand what any of this means. I'm going to walk through all that later. I

just want you to understand the core concept of not doing too much and that

of thing. So right here, we have two cymbal crashes and a hi -hat.

That can't happen. At most you can have two things happening, but I'm just going

to stick with one here.

I'm going to get rid of a hi -hat and just keep one pressed.

Okay, we're getting better.

Another issue this has, and all of them have, is that these velocities are all

the same, they're all all the way full, and it's all 100 % locked in on time.

What this causes is a robotic sound and seal to the drums, because the real

drummer is not just 100 % all the time. They're going to ebb and flow, and

things will be louder and softer, and even individual notes in between them,

different volumes and stuff like that. This is where the way you capture the

drums and the performance is important, and it's a lot easier to fix that going

in and to try to build it in afterwards so i'm not even going to fix it in this

example we're just going to move on to the next one bad midi number four so

is a different song and this second example is stock drums just to you know

the concept flow across multiple things so here we go

Okay, so this one is kind of my example of someone who doesn't know how a drum

beat should be made, kind of how a drummer is going to play. The issue

I'm not making fun of anyone who programs drums like this, like we've all

there. The issue here is that number one, it's not consistent, and number

it has no groove. It does not feel good, nothing. And so what I would do in this

situation is really focus on drums always have a strong backbeat.

and the backbeat is what's happening on two and four, or it's kind of the

response. So if your downbeat is here, you know, one, then the snare, the

backbeat, whatever's playing opposite of that gives it a nice push -pull

feeling, if that makes sense. So one, snare, snare, kick, snare, snare, right?

That kind of thing. So the issue with this is that we have snare happening all

the time, kick happening occasionally, but it's not consistent.

And so what I'm actually going to do,

And I know someone out there is going to get mad because a snare on all the

beats is a drum beat that can happen, but you need to be intentional about it,

and your kick needs to support it in other ways that help it sound good.

So for now, we're going to just do a simple 1 -2 -3 -4 kind of thing.

So that means all of these, all my 1s and 3s, need to go down to the kick.

It just feels a lot better than it did before, if that makes sense. And a lot

drum programming is feel.

It's like, how does this groove make me feel? How does it fit into the song?

You know, you want to support what's happening, and you don't want to step on

it, and you just want to deliver that pocket groove.

If you don't know what pocket is, it's just when the drums sit right in this

sweet spot that just feels good, that's the pocket.

Okay, my final example here. Here we go.

Hopefully at this point you're starting to see issues, because there's some

repeating issues across the board. So the problem with this...

Again, we have multiple things happening.

When we go for this drum fill at the end, there's two sets of cymbals going.

It either needs to be a crash or a hi -hat open or something.

So I'm actually going to do the ride here.

And then the second set here, I don't want a hi -hat happening.

along with the ride because again a drummer can't do that. So I'm going to

these and also put them on the ride.

If you'll notice I pulled the velocity down on all those secondary notes

when a drummer plays they're not going like the same level all the time.

a little bit of give to it so they probably accent certain notes in the

So in this instance it's one and two and three and four and where all those

ands, those upbeats are

softer. Now it's something like 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and, where all of those

ands, those upbeats, are softer and the downbeats, the main beats, are accented.

So I'll show you what that sounds like.

Nice. Another thing a drummer will do is set up the start of a phrase with a

cymbal craft.

We can do something like that to start the phrase.

So another thing a drummer could do is like a mid -phrase fill just to keep the

energy going. With these two kicks, I'm gonna have different cymbal splashes.

Other things that might happen, the drummer would likely not hit a kick when

he's starting a fill unless the kick was intentionally part of the fill.

And then just for the sake of proving my point about repeating velocities, I'll

pull these down a little bit.

And then make sure that each note in the phrase is a little bit different.

I know that's really subtle, but that kind of thing adds up across your whole

track and will really make a difference in the level of realism that your drums

have. Another thing that's important about drumming is you have to consider,

number one, what you're playing, when you're playing, but also negative space

when you are not playing, because there's something to be said about

space in your drum parts for other things to happen. This will be an

not a lot of negative space, so I'm going to intentionally fill a lot of

with little drum hits and things.

That's cool, it's fun, but it's worth considering, you know, is that necessary

or... Can I get away with doing less?

What would it sound like if I do less? So here's an example of the same thing,

but with a lot less going on.

Very different.

overall feel. And the second one left a lot more room for you to hear the

instruments and kind of enjoy the other things that are happening.

So things like that are important to think about.

You know, how can I tweak this? How can I add things or subtract things to

ultimately make it more groovy, make it sound better? Stuff like that. So

another thing I want to mention is what's called ghost notes.

And if you ever watch a drummer play or listen to isolated drums, there's often

more happening than your main loud hits.

I'm gonna go back to my other song real quick.

And I'll just put something in here.

Okay, so that's what you're used to hearing, kind of the accents, the louder

parts.

What I like to do is go back and add in ghost notes.

And I'll kind of show you. They're hard to just explain, but hopefully the more

you hear it, you'll start to understand what's happening. So the way I do this,

because I am part drummer, I'll tap one hand kind of on the desk, and then the

other hand, kind of the offbeat hand, which would be my left hand, is going to

play in those ghost notes.

so

okay

so it's not even something you notice all the time it's very subtle but it

keep that groove moving it keeps the rhythm feeling good and so stuff like

is super important to getting realistic sounding drums that sound, you know,

lifelike and like a real person performed them. So I'm sure at this

of what I covered is still a little new or a little confusing or you have more

questions or you're like, how do I actually take this weird little bit of

knowledge and make full drum performances for my song?

That's what the next episodes are for. So if you're watching this all in one

sitting, it'll be the next section, module two, episode two, whatever you

to call it, and I will cover...

the actual performing, the programming, getting all of it out of your head into

the MIDI. If that is interesting to you and you want to continue learning, stick

around or go down below in the description or in the comments and find

episode. I'll have it in a playlist. I'll put it all over so it's really easy

for you to find. Thank you so much for watching this portion, and I will see

very shortly, hopefully, in the next module.

Welcome back to my software drum production mini course part two. In this

this is the real life application of performing programming and editing your

MIDI, getting it out of your head into the DAW and coming out with good

realistic MIDI performances for us to then go tweak and mix and do all the

things to in a later episode. If you did not see episode one talking all about

MIDI mindset and how to think like a drummer, make sure you go check that

I'll have it above.

If you want to download all of the assets of this course, I have those

on my website for a small fee.

This whole course is entirely free, and so thank you for going over there and

supporting me by purchasing those assets.

Let's get right into the drum programming. The very first thing I need

in this section is programming versus performing.

So programming, this is where you take your little pencil tool in your DAW and

you draw in all the little dots, and then you hit play and you hear drums.

is programming.

because you're just going in very methodically drawing out your drum

There's nothing wrong with that. That's an effective way of doing things.

However, I really recommend performing your drums.

This is a little more hardware dependent. You need something that you

perform on, like a keyboard, the little drum pads, something like that, that you

can actually input your data, your human data into, if that makes sense. This is

going to do a huge number of little variances in your performance.

and then you can clean those up and tighten them up later, but it's a lot

to program in those human errors and variances than it is to just have them

clean them up. So if you have some sort of little keyboard, this is your sign,

this is your call to figure out how to use it to record your drums on.

I cannot stress that enough.

I don't want to say you'll never get good sounding drums programmed, because

100 % can, but it's way, way easier to just play it.

Even if you have to do one piece at a time, you might not be keyboard drummer

virtuoso and that's okay, but just start getting used to that because it'll

super help you in the long run. And along those same lines, it's actually

important to have a good feel and a good rhythm and groove than it is to be

actually perfectly in time. So this was a mistake I made a lot when I was

starting is that I thought the most important thing was for drums to be

time. And while they do need to keep time and be kind of in time, it's more

important that they feel good and they support the groove and the rhythm of the

song than it is to actually be 100 % locked into the grid. Let me find a

of the song here.

This is fine. This will work.

So we'll start with performing, and then I'll show you how to program if you

want to.

There's a lot to cover here, right?

So we need to be able to perform realistic performances, but you also

basically write the drum parts into your head.

And the best way I've found to do this is to just sit at your keyboard, let the

music play, tap around on some drums, and see what you like.

This is a basic.

Okay.

I kind of like that.

Keep doing that until you get something that just feels good. Eventually you'll

land on that groove, that part, and you're like, yes, that.

So I almost always start with kick and snare, and then I come back and start to

add in the other embellishments.

because it's really hard to play the entire thing how you want it here we go

cool

that feels like a good little section so now i'm going to open up the midi this

is going to be different you know depending on what you're working in and

going to quantize these So I'm going to select all of them.

And quantize might be a different phrase in your DAW, but just try to find

whatever time correction thing there is. And now depending on how fast you play

this, quarter notes are right on the beat. So if our beat is here,

quarter note is right on the beat.

Left quarter note.

Eighth note would be double that.

16th note would be double that, so even faster.

So depending on where your pieces of your groove fit in, that's the level

need to quantize to.

I know for this that it's all eighth notes.

And now the default is strength at 100, and we don't want that because it's

already just going to ruin the groove.

So I'm going to just pull that back to like 70 or 80.

Depending on how well I played it and how tight I want the final, I will move

that strength anywhere from like 20 all the way up to 90. Generally for more

polished genres like rock, pop, or country, you're going to want that a

tighter. And then if you're getting more into like a vintage, old school, indie,

anything like that, I usually aim a little looser on the timing. You'll also

notice this song has a bit of a shuffle to it.

It's not your regular straight groove. And when I quantized it to this regular

straight groove, it doesn't feel quite right.

This is something called swing.

And this basically pushes your second eighth note back.

So instead of a straight, like... You instead get this kind of a

shuffle feel. It's called a swing feel.

So hear the difference?

It's not quite a different note. It's its own little thing, so you kind of got

to get used to swing. If you're in a situation where your straight notes just

don't feel right, it could be a swing situation.

You just need to experiment that and figure it out. Generally, a good rule of

thumb is if your song has a three feel, like if you can count threes in amongst

the fours, then that could be swing.

So if I hit play, You can actually hear very distinct 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3.

Here we go.

So songs don't always have that, and if your song does have that, then you are

in swing zone and you need to account for that. Logic has the swing control

right here, and the more you push this back, you'll see these eighth notes get

delayed a little bit.

So let me try it now.

Now I'm going to listen specifically to the bass and kind of the more rhythmic

stuff in this mix.

So right here, the bass moves and we don't have a kick supporting it. And now

you don't always need a kick supporting your bass, but when you do have bass and

kick together, it just feels really good. So let me play this back.

That just feels a little better.

Now that we've done a pass of kick and snare, now it's time to add in a little

more of what's called subdivision, which is those in -between -the -beat things

happening. You don't always need to do this, but the majority of drum beats

this, and it's usually represented in some sort of cymbal or tom and some

notes. if applicable.

So those are your tools to kind of make subdivision happen. I like to start by

experimenting around with the different symbols in the kit and see what I like

the sound of for that section.

I think for this I like the hi -hat, and so I'm going to find a hi -hat position

that works well and just sounds the way I want it to.

If you're not familiar with the hi -hat, it's the little thing that's like two

cymbals, and they kind of stack together, and the drummer can control

left foot how open or closed these are. So a really closed one sounds like this,

and then as the pedal gets lifted and those get opened, the sound kind of

up.

I know you've heard that before somewhere. So just figure out which one

like. You don't have to be an expert on what all these actually are.

Just find what you like.

So I kind of like this one. So I'm going to go ahead and hit record again and

get that in there.

I'm going to highlight these and quantize again to what I have set up.

And usually once I get this dialed in, the swing and the strength, I don't

change it. That way it kind of feels cohesive.

If you start changing your swing, not even in different parts of the song, but

the same section of the song, if you change the swing, you're going to get

weird tearing and stuff happening in your drums that you're probably not

to like.

It's important to note, too, when I recorded this, I did not hit it as hard

could every time. So it was not one of these.

It was, I pulsed and I pushed the downbeats, so the main accents.

And that gives it more of this kind of push -pull feel.

Okay, so next, if I was a drummer, I might be having a good time doing this,

likely, knowing myself, I'd be a little bit bored. So my right hand would start

to move, sorry, this hand, my left hand, would start to move in between big

snare heads. Because there's a lot of down time, this hand's just doing that.

And so I'm going to start to record in some ghost notes where I naturally

If you're thinking of a real kit, your right hand is generally playing the hi

-hat or the cymbal or something like that.

and your left hand is on the snare. So typically you'd have something like

Hi -hat and snare.

And that leaves a lot of downtime for the left hand.

So what a lot of drummers do is fill in on those offbeats.

that stuff a little bit there, but hopefully you get the idea.

So what I like to do is come back and record those those little ghost notes on

separate lane.

So what I mean by lane is a different midi note here.

So our main hits have been on this D1, and depending on your drum library these

are all going to be different things, but I know that I also have a softer

of edge of drum hit here.

And I like how that sounds.

So what I'm going to do, I've already played this, so I'm just going to tap

for my own mental sanity, and then play the offbeats on this hand. So basically

what we're going to have is that this hand is going to be up.

I'm going to go ahead and hit record and get that down.

Okay, this wasn't perfect, and it never is.

What I'm going to do is quantize these to the same groove as once I did a

triplet here, so I'm going to switch this over to triplet.

And I'm going to turn these up so you can hear what I did.

This sounds a little messy. I'm not a fan of this. A couple issues.

Your ghosting should not hit when the main snare does or right before the main

snare does.

Most people, they don't have the chops to do that. I'm going to get rid of this

one because it's on a snare.

This is on a snare.

This one's on a snare.

I hope you're seeing, you know, they're lining up on this grid here.

So I'm going to get rid of this little triplet because it gets a little too

close to the main snare.

And I don't like that either.

Same thing, this is too close to the snare.

It's on the snare.

And then here I'm not going to do ghosting because I actually did a little

thing in the hi -hat.

And I'll turn these up so these actually sound a little better.

And that's an important thing I want to make note of that I just did.

You can mix your drums before you get to mixing based on just your velocities.

So velocity is how hard or soft the note is, and that's represented in MIDI.

And so depending on how loud or soft you want the drum to be played, you can

adjust that in velocity.

That's actually going to get you more mileage than adjusting the volume

the velocity is actually sample drums recorded at different volumes.

Take the snare for instance.

You can tell if I play it really softly, it's just barely tapping that drum.

But the louder I get, it has more crack, it has more impact.

Same thing with the hi -hats.

So when you're adjusting the velocity, you're telling the drum program,

you're using, hey, we want... the loud samples here or we want the soft samples

here and that actually makes it more realistic it's more complex than simply

volume control for the drum if that makes sense so let me play it again

also those times that i hit the kick twice

likely the drummer would not also be ghosting because it's just a lot um and

that's going to vary depending on the drummer so you have to figure out what

kind of drummer you are in your head But this is not for me, so I'm going to

take it out.

So anywhere we have a double kick happening, not a double kick, but a

little kick there, I'm going to take those off.

so now these ghost notes are they're just a little too loud for my taste so

going to highlight them all and turn the velocity down even more and a lot of

times i'll have them up when i'm working on them so i can hear but then blend

them down to the full sound of the kit

So that has way more groove and interest to it than it did before we added those

ghost notes and things like that. Another thing a drummer does at the

the phrase, I mentioned this a little bit in episode one, but they hit some

of symbol, some sort of way to let people know like, hey, this is, boom,

section. This first hi -hat, instead of doing the hi -hat, I'm going to go find

a symbol.

And I know on addictive drums, they start way up here at F4.

That's a little loud, so I'll pull it down just a bit.

Another little tip and secret for this is I like to put my ghost notes on a

different channel, so if I need to bring them all up or down, it's really easy

to highlight them.

But if they're all on the same thing, like these hi -hats for instance, it's

really hard to just get...

the quiet ones, if that makes sense. So by keeping them on a different note,

you're able to quickly get in there and change things. Important note there.

So I'm going to do another example on a different drum kit for a different song.

So we're going to use the Logic Drums for this on my Swamp Jelly Jamboree

Cool, so that's a good section. I'm going to do the same method as before.

going to start with a kick and snare, then we'll do hi -hat and ghost note

stuff, and then any accents.

Exciting stuff, I guess.

Okay, here we go.

Cool. That's a pretty basic groove, but I wanted to spice up the straight back

and forth with some other little things happening, so that's why I added some

excitement there.

Okay, so next we will do some symbols.

And a hot hat. So here we go.

If you hear this sound and you're wondering what's happening, it's an open

-hat followed by a closed hi -hat. What a lot of these drum libraries will do is

they'll simulate the hi -hat actually closing and getting snaps shut. So that

kind of sounds like this.

So that's what I was doing there, and a lot of times drummers will put that in

to spice things up.

Alright, one more time. I want that hi -hat to close sooner.

So I will highlight everything again.

Tighten it up just a bit. If you'll notice, my strength is still not at

kind of about 67 right now. And then if I zoom in, you'll notice that these are

not perfectly on the grid. And that's what we want to see.

Not perfect.

So I want to put a better fill in this section. And now if you haven't heard

word fill before, it's basically something a drummer does, a little

embellishment. At the end of the phrase, they'll either pick up the energy, like

help you get somewhere, or bring down the energy. Say, hey, the next section's

going to be down. It's a signal to both the band and the rest of the audience,

like, hey, this is where we're going, you know, up or down or whatever it may

be.

So I have an idea for that kind of fill.

So I'm going to do that.

Nice. So I'll tighten those up. Next I want to put in the ghost notes. I found

this little snare edge right here. So here's center.

Here's the edge.

Really similar.

But they're just different enough that you can kind of get.

a difference there same thing again

this

song is a little less conducive to the ghost notes just because of the feel of

kind of the groove it doesn't really need it as much, but I'll still put them

there and just keep them really low.

So right kind of halfway through this, I kind of want another little fill going

on. So again,

I'm just going to record over it, and then I'll delete the notes that are kind

of conflicting and taking us out of the four -limb rule there.

That's simple enough.

Cool, all of these need to go, because we have one, two, three, so we will pull

these out right here.

And these.

And a lot of times what I'll do to set this up is I like the hi -hat to kind of

throw a little splash, just so you still hear it while that fill is going on.

So let's try that.

That was in the wrong spot, so we fix that too.

And then it'd be cool to have a little crash coming out of this.

Maybe the other one there we go

Okay

here

so here's the whole groove so far

Cool. That, again, just adds to the groove. More and more going on.

So the other half of entering the notes in is programming.

So for whatever reason, you cannot lay hands on a keyboard or a little drum pad

thing, but you have to get your drums out. You have to program it. You don't

really have an option.

So let me find another spot.

Bounce back to my first song here.

Okay, so I will create a new MIDI region here.

That's going to be different depending on what you're doing.

And get the pencil tool.

And I like to start at full velocity and just change it from there.

There, there.

The importance is consistency here.

Set up that note that comes back down from the band.

So I kind of want to change the feel a little bit here.

And just kind of go a little straighter.

Cool.

So I know these are not swung, so I'm going to add some swing now.

Here's the note.

Swing it.

I'm going to make them a little softer on the velocity.

Next, I like these two.

I'm going to go back and forth between them.

Put them all on the red.

But I'm going to make the first ones a little bit louder.

We'll need that the whole time.

Pick it off with a craft.

Something else you can do, because we're only using three of our four limbs at

the moment.

We have the kick, which is the right foot. We have the snare, which is the

hand. And the cymbal is the right hand. But we still have a left foot.

And the left foot cannot do much because it's on the hi -hat.

However, it can either close or do what's called a splash.

So the splash is like a quick tap and it makes the cymbals jangle together.

So you can 100 % put one of these in there with it. And I'll kind of show you

what that sounds like.

Get a bunch of them here.

It's actually hard to hear those at all.

If I mute the ride you'll hear it better.

So I'll move it to the splash now so you can hear the difference.

And that's actually a totally acceptable drum part and I've seen drummers play

this. It's not that challenging for them.

Putting in a little bit of...

additional interest there actually forget that i'm going to do a ghosting

instead so same kind of concept

Something like that.

Unquantize them.

Right there.

Get rid of that one.

Have a little more ghosting in here because we don't have the double kick

And then at the end, I feel like we need a fill, so I'll just clear out what we

have.

It's a good time to mention rim shots versus regular hits.

A rim shot is a weird combination of the edge of the drum with the center of the

drum that actually makes a more powerful crack sound.

So that's kind of some edge of the drum.

right there you're basically combining those but it gets a really powerful

for this fill i think i want it instead of a regular hit i want the rim shot

cool

great so let's listen to that so far

Great. The final thing I like to do if I'm strictly programming is highlight

them all. And this is a logic thing, but I'm sure whatever you're using has

something similar.

So it's called humanize. And what this does, if you have to look for it in your

own situation, is randomize the velocities, starting position, and

different notes.

So I'm just going to run it by the default here.

I've already selected the notes I want, and I'm going to hit operate.

And it's hard to see, but they all slightly moved.

And so I'll hit it a couple more times just to kind of nudge them a bit more.

And now if we do it, there's some slight differences.

My cymbals are a little loud.

I'm going to mix it a little bit with the velocity, pull them all down.

And the standard snare head isn't cutting it, so I'm going to make that a

shot.

Nice. Although the humanized tool is really helpful, it's still not the same

a human playing it. So again, if you can...

play it on something.

Even if you have to do the on -screen keyboard,

it's not

going to do velocity, but at least it'll do timing to give you one element of

variation. That would still be better than nothing. Final thought for this is

that, you know, we've made a bunch of little sections, and that's great, but

need to make it into a full song now. There's a few strategies for this. You

either piece your way through it, or you could try to perform something.

So what I'll do because I've had my share of practice actually playing it,

me make a new track here,

is I'll start at the very beginning

and figure out what I want to do right off the bat.

I wrote this song, so I kind of know what's coming. But listen to the whole

thing and figure out, what do you want going on there? So I'm going to start

with what's called a flam. That's when basically one stick is close to the drum

and the other is far away, and they come down and hit the drum at the same time.

That's what gives it that extra little flam. I don't know.

Flam is a building block of how I describe things. So, you know, a single

sounds like this.

But a flam has a little bit more of a...

so it's a very traditional drumline kind of sound very concert snare type

of thing right but if you put it in this context

you'll actually hear the similarities to things you hear in like country or rock

actually really like that. I'm going to start the song with that.

Okay, so that's good. I'll do a quick quantize and keep moving. So this is

quantize can really start to mess you up because all these slams i did get rid

of those all these slams i did they're not different enough now if i play it

back

they

actually don't sound good in fact they actually start to bump into each other

and cause like a pseudo phasing issue so i'm going to go ahead and highlight

these and take the strength down to zero

Now you can see a little more of that magic that's in there.

And I'm going to take my stick that was the lower stick, the quieter one, which

I put on the regular hit, not the rim shot.

I'm going to pull those down.

And play that unless you hear it.

My main hit, I want to quantize maybe to like 50%.

And the secondary hit, I'll do like low 20s or something just to bring them a

little closer together.

Okay.

We're at the end of the phrase. We need a fill to build into the next section,

so I'm just going to play a little tom thing.

All right, I'm going to quantize these.

I did not like... Whoops, we need to get back up here.

Let's put those on the same drum.

All right, now we're in.

Big crash.

So I don't want to pull open hi -hat, but I feel like a closed is not enough

energy.

It's got to be big Home Depot energy, so I'm going to do the open hi -hat.

Semi -open, not a pull.

Kind of like that one.

All right, I'm going to play it.

Start with a symbol.

Cool.

That's good.

Untie all that. Tighten it up. Get rid of that.

Mishit there.

These are kind of loud. I'll pull them down.

Let me put some ghosting in there.

Quantize these.

Where are the ones that are on pics or on snares?

This one.

That one's too close to the snare.

So I have an idea for a fill here.

So when you're going for a fill, try to feel it out. Figure out what works. How

can you set up the groove in the best way? It's all about setup and delivery

pocket and all those buzzwords.

Let me put that in, and then I'll try to connect it here.

It's like right here. Two snares sounds okay, but like a snare and a rim shot

snare sounds better.

Here's snare, snare.

Here's rim shot.

But two rim shots is not good.

Whoops.

I'll do all three back to back here.

Just those tiny little variations that make the biggest difference.

There we go. A little simpler is the trick.

One more hi -hat because we don't want to stop it too soon.

And this needs to be triplets.

And no swing on the triplet.

So basically you would do that the entire song.

You know, build it up, bring it down, all that kind of thing.

It does take time. If you're feeling lazy, you've got to deal with it. It's

something you have to do to get it to sound real.

But it's way faster than recording live drums, number one, and you don't have to

deal with a lot of the issues and things associated with live drums.

So it's still faster in the long run, but you do have to really get in there

dial it the way you want.

Diving into drum plugin tweaking, I guess we'll call it. I'm going to use

Addictive Drums and Logic Drum Designer as my two drum plugins of choice.

I know there's tons of drum plugins out there, so the hope of this part is just

to teach you the concepts and teach you the things you need to look for so that

you can find them in your own drum plugin and apply it. But if you happen

have Addictive Drums or Logic Drummer, that's just going to help you dial

in faster and know exactly where to look. Okay.

So I will start with Addictive Drums and then move to Logic Drums after, and

we'll do the same process twice so you really make sure you get a handle on it

and understand what's going on. I'm going to open up the drum plugin. The

I do it in this order is because I like to have the drum part first so I can

just set it on loop while I tweak the drums. It's just an easier workflow than

trying to, like, play the drums, tweak the drums all at the same time. Here's

what we currently have going on.

So most drum plugins will have somewhere you can go to swap out the kit pieces.

And by kit pieces, I mean, you know, kick drums, snare drums, toms, cymbals.

can actually swap out these elements with different ones to quickly make big

changes to the sound of your drums.

So in Addictive Drums, that's over here on the kit tab.

You can solo up certain elements. So this is just what the kick sounds like.

And we can start to cycle through or pick different ones. If you know kind of

roughly what types of drums you like, like you know you like a 24 -inch kick

you like maple or things like that, you can kind of start to guess with some of

the names here, but usually I find it helpful to just start swapping stuff out

while it's playing and figure out what you like.

Not that one.

So, alright, I think it's between this Gretsch round badge, the

Lydie and Ludwig.

I like that.

And then this, uh, orc pie down here.

Honestly, I like the, uh, not the Ludwig.

This one.

I'm gonna roll with that.

Alright, snare time.

When I'm doing this, I like to go back and forth between just soloing out the

element I'm tweaking and hearing it in the context of the whole kit, and even

the context of the whole song, if you're able to. This just helps to give you a

better perspective on what it's going to sound like in context.

I'm gonna roll with that one. I like kind of the ringy sound.

I'm gonna keep doing this with all the kit pieces, and I'm gonna tweak the hi

-hat.

I like that one.

For toms, to me it's important that it's all the same set of toms.

That way you get a cohesive sound.

But you can mess with tweaking toms, but you didn't hear it from me.

So let me skip to this end here where I have a little tom fill.

It's a little annoying, I apologize.

So I'm going to switch out whole tom sets here.

That was pretty nice.

Nope. I like the...

I think I like these Fairfax ones.

Let's hear it with the whole track here.

Cool, that's feeling good. Let me check on cymbals real quick, although I'm not

doing too much with cymbals.

We're using that one.

This is this one.

I usually prefer darker, bigger symbols.

So like 16s are too small for me. Something like 18 or 20 is usually what

like.

Where is that?

Let's try that one.

Cool. Next, I want to look at tuning. I'm liking how stuff is sounding, but

next logical step is to just tweak the tuning of the drums to see if we can get

something that hits a little more how we want.

For addictive drums, that's over on the Edit tab, and you're going to turn on

Pit Piece Controls.

And the thing we're going to mess with here is the pit.

And now we want to look at this main knob.

The overhead room offset is going to change the tuning of the drum just in

room, and I do not like that because to me if you tune a drum it needs to be

that same tuning everywhere, but I'm a little old school like that.

I'm going to try tuning this kick down.

I kind of like that.

So let me tune the snare now.

I want ringy, but I want it to still be deep and powerful. So I think that's a

good blend right there.

Great.

The next thing I like to look for is any sort of mic blending and that type of

thing that is available.

Not all drum plugins have this. It just depends what you have. If you're using

something like Superior Drummer, you have a ton of different options and you

blend different mics individually.

If you are in Addictive Drums, there's this little blend thing right here

that'll let you blend between two mics. The kick and the snare both have that

for addictive drums. Other libraries like the Logic Drummer does not have as

much of this, so you know, just check and see what your plugin has and tweak

taste as you can.

So traditionally with multiple mic setups on a kick, you have the front mic

a beater mic or the inside mic or whatever you want. Basically the front

going to get the low end and the power.

And then the beater mic or the kick -in mic is going to get more of the attack

and snap.

So you can simulate that with this blend ray here.

If I go front, it's got a little more power.

And then beater has a little more click.

And you can blend it. So I usually like more of the front.

Snare, same thing. You have a top mic and a bottom mic.

the top is going to be more of the impact and the power, and the bottom is

to be more of a splash and a sizzle.

And I like a little more of the top.

It's also important to look for what's called snare buzz or bleed, and this is

the sound of the other drums vibrating.

drums that aren't being played. So Addictive Drums addresses that with this

little send to snare buzz right there. Other libraries like Superior Drummer,

they have what's called bleed that you can enable for certain channels.

And although this is counterintuitive because it's going to make your drums a

little more dirty and unclean because it's not just the source you're

to, this actually makes them sound more realistic because a real drum kit, if

you hit the tom, you're going to hear that tom rattle the other drums.

and it's actually part of what makes live -sounded acoustic drums sound live.

If you listen to this, you actually hear the kick playing in the snare.

If I turn this off, you do not hear it.

So that's an important little note. When I hit the kick here, you actually hear

a little bit in the snare. You can see it coming in.

Same thing with the toms.

It's hard to hear, but it's there a little bit, and it just, it makes it

more real. So if you have the option for that, turn it on. The next thing I like

to look at is the overhead and the room signals.

Depending on, again, depending on your library, it's going to look a little

different. Addictive Drums has separate mic blends for overheads and room, and

if you're not used to live drums, This might actually feel weird to you. You

might be wanting just a volume for every symbol and every thing, but that's

generally not how acoustic drums are recorded and handled.

So your overhead microphones, these are usually mics above the drum kit that

capture the picture of the kit as a whole. It's usually a little more high

It's going to capture more of that sizzle and sparkle and transient attack,

it's really going to highlight your cymbals.

So let me solo that up so you can hear just what overheads should sound like.

So you get some snare, you get some cymbals and stuff like that.

Kick is there, but not a ton.

Here's Tom's.

So it's a very top -end, both in geographic location and sonically, like

picture of your drums. The room is a mic or set of mics.

further away from the drums like across the room and this is actually as a

person who listens to drums you're used to hearing a room sound of the drums

because you're not sticking your ear right up on the drum you're standing

some distance and that is what the room mics actually simulate they simulate a

picture of the drums in the room like as an ensemble

So again, you still hear everything, but it's a little rolled off, a little

contained, a little distanced. And when you blend that in with the whole kit,

you get a really nice full picture.

So here's without the rooms.

I'll put it in the track too.

It just kind of sounds small.

So that's... huge if you don't have individual control over the room i'm

you can kind of simulate this with reverb but being able to adjust the room

really important it's also worth looking around in your drum library for the

amount that each drum goes to the room so addictive drums has this little knob

up here for each element let's take the snare for example and you have a total

snare volume but you also have controls for how loud it is in

the overheads and how loud it is in the room.

So if I take this overhead level, let me fill it up.

So right now we have the snare mic, the close mic, we have the room,

or sorry, we have the overhead, and we have the room mic.

You can actually control how much of each one is going where, if that makes

sense. So if I pull down overhead completely, it's now not going to the

overhead. If I turn it up, now it is. Same with room. I get less room, more

room.

Generally, I leave these all flat, you know, at unity, at zero, whatever you

want to call it. And I only tweak if I feel it's needed. But usually, I just

want a full picture balance between all the drums.

And then if I want more or less of a drum, you can adjust the total amount

This goes everywhere.

Every drum library is going to be different.

But usually the higher end ones will have controls for the overall level of

drum, not the level of the close mic fader.

This right here is the close mic fader. And if I turn this up, you will hear

more snare, but it's not completely more. It's not relative to all the

locations.

If I pull it down, you still hear it in the other places.

Just a close thing.

Sometimes the drum libraries will have some sort of envelope control or decay

control or attack, sustain, release, all of those kind of words. I'll briefly

explain what those do and when I would tweak them. Envelope is basically a path

that the sound follows that adjusts the dynamics of the sound.

Sometimes that can be applied directly to volume, other times it's applied to

things like pitch. And so in drum world it usually almost always handles either

the pitch of the drum or the volume intensity of the drum. You can turn both

these on in Addictive right here.

You can actually adjust things like release.

Let me fill up the snare.

If I wanted it slightly less ringy, I could do something like this to kind of,

you know, we have the initial attack here, and then it drops off and then

off again. And the longer these drop -offs are, the longer the tail of the

is going to hang around.

And the more we shorten these, it's almost like you're throwing a wallet or

something down on the drums to kind of dampen it.

And just play with it until you get a feel that you like, and also play it

you know, in the context of the whole kit, and make sure it sounds how you

And the whole track.

I don't like that. I like kind of the ringiness that it had.

Sounds bigger.

Okay.

So now I've moved over to my second song with the Logic Drum Kit Designer. This

is all stock stuff in Logic that we're going to be messing with now. So if you

have a stock drum plugin, this might be a little bit closer aligned to some of

the options you have. If you're using Logic, great. It's one for one, follow

along. The problem with the default drum designer is there's actually more

options hidden that you cannot access.

So you need to load this up in a different way. Close this out and come

here to Drum Kit.

in the library.

If this is not open, you can click it right here. I think there's a hotkey. I

think it's Y for library.

Go to drum kit, go to multi -channel kits, and you want the ones with the

sign. So I'm going to click Liverpool Plus.

And now that's going to open what's called a track stack. It's a folder.

And you might notice now you cannot find the plugin.

You need to open this up and go to the first channel, which is overheads.

And this is kind of your master that handles the whole drum kit. And then

gives you way more things.

way more channels for everything and this might be a little overwhelming and

we'll cover this more in mixing but what you need to know right now is just go

to this first channel here overheads and open this up and now if you click on

each drum you have way more controls you have leap which is the drum bleeding

into other things you have overheads you have everything you'd expect

So we click through here.

You'll notice it's really similar to how addictive drums is. You have your

overhead sound.

You have a kick in sound.

You have a kick out sound.

Those sound really similar.

Snare top.

Snare bottom.

Hi -hat.

All your toms. You have your room A.

Or room B.

You have lead, which is the bleed of all the drums in the other mics, which is

nice.

And all together it gives you a pretty good full -sounding kit.

So now I'm going to go ahead and start tweaking the kit pieces. So let's start

with the kick.

I like that one.

That's kinda nice.

This is where you can really start to shape the vibe of your song. You know,

we want something a little more old school, I might grab one of these

felt or vintage puns.

But if we want it to sound a little more modern, maybe something like the Tight

Maple or the Studio Deep.

I did like that one.

70s pun.

I move on to snare and I might come back and make more tweaks.

We don't want breathes.

A lot of options here.

If you click this little eye, you'll see a little bit more information about the

drums. So if you're like, oh, I want coated heads or something weird like

you might be able to find it.

Kind of like that one.

Like that one For Tom's they have full sets here.

Let me see if I have a Go right here

Not

that one

I like those the best. Next, let's see what these controls over here do and how

they can kind of help you. Here's the tuning again, like we mentioned before.

Gain is an overall volume for that drum that goes everywhere, and dampen is

their version of envelope controls.

So this will kind of dampen, deaden up the response of the drum.

Let me get you a bigger section here.

So it's completely dead.

A little more response.

Let's turn up the kick a little bit.

And then the two rooms here, this is just a weird logic thing. You have two

different drum rooms you can send this to. A is usually like a stereo one and B

is a mono one. I generally prefer everything on the stereo one.

I just like how that room sounds better, and I like stereo information. That

just personally makes the drums feel bigger when you have more stereo

information coming.

Let's see if I tune it down a little bit.

Some people tune their drums to specific frequencies in the song.

I don't do that. I just do it by ear.

and tweak it until it feels good i don't know sending it to the song just feels

like a lot of work all the time i'm sure it's good but for me i just like to do

it right here

great

let me check this next

The toms in Logic, they have controls for the individual toms and then the

of toms as a whole. I almost always tweak the group as a whole so it stays

sounding more consistent, but if you want to get into really tweaky stuff,

can start adjusting individuals.

like to me that high tom could use a little more volume a little more

it

might be the middle tom i'm hearing

yeah

okay

And then I'll dampen all the toms just a little bit. I like ringy toms, but I

don't like it to where they ring so much that it starts to get in the way of

everything.

Great.

And those are all going to room A. I have overheads in room turned on for

everything, which is what I want.

Symbols we can also tweak.

So let's do that now.

Sometimes I'll turn it up just so I can hear when I'm tweaking.

I don't like that one.

Yeah, I like that.

I like that one better.

Symbols, we got two crashes and a ride.

Let me try just modern.

Now modern darts.

So these are going to room B, but I'd rather them go to room A.

And then I'll just switch this ride to Modern Dark.

So it's in the same family as the other cymbals. This does get borderline into

mixing because we're going to look at the faders and levels a little bit, but

this is just blending the different mics like we did in the previous section

with Addictive Drums.

So let me just click through this real quick.

I like all that.

I'm not a fan of that snare bottom, so I'm going to pull it down and put snare

top a little bit more.

I'm going to turn up the room, too. I like roomy.

I mean... I like that.

Overhead.

A little more there, too.

I hope you're kind of getting what I'm trying to say. You want it to sound more

close, more intimate, dead.

pocket, whatever you want to call it. So I'm going to pull down a little bit of

overheads and a lot of room.

Now it's right in that pocket.

You can even pull down leak a little bit too.

If you have any questions about this, let me know down in the comments below.

I'll do my best to answer and get back to you.

Alright, so starting with Addictive Drums, we're going to be the same

song, I apologize, but they keep things simple.

So I'm going to start with making it sound as good as I can just within the

plugin, and then bouncing out to Logic to do some additional things.

So I'm going to start in Addictive Drums in the plugin.

And then for the Logic Drums, we'll mess with more of the multi -output, mixing

the channels directly in Logic. And hopefully that'll give you two good

scenarios that you could choose from on how you want to approach this. The very

first thing I do is a lot of times I'll pull all my faders down and just get a

good blend of the drums.

I'm not using any flex beads, so I'm not going to worry about those.

And we'll pull all this stuff down.

So I just start by balancing the kick and the snare.

I'll also pull this drum fader up to unity and make sure my master is around

dB. It's already too loud.

This is an important section.

Making sure this hits around 12 dB, your whole total of your drums, is important

for gain staging.

And gain staging is basically managing the levels of your song as you go so it

doesn't get way too loud or way too quiet. If you've ever, like, have worked

a song and you're just clipping your master all the time and it's just

everything's way too loud, that's probably a result of not gain staging

properly. So I just enter everything in the mindset of I'm going to manage these

levels as I go.

because i can notoriously just keep making things louder we're going to keep

this around the minus 12 for my entire drum mix a

little more kick let's get some overheads in there

see it's already getting

loud room

Get some toms in there.

A little more toms. Toms like a lot of volume. For whatever reason, they just

sound better louder.

The other thing I start to adjust at this point is the panning.

And that's how left or right a drum sounds.

And basically, I like to solo up the overheads and listen to where things are

I know that I'm panning things correctly.

And then you can kind of exaggerate the panning to make it sound bigger. But you

want to make sure if the high tom is over on the left in the overheads that

pan it over on the left in the close mic. Let me solo this up.

Snare is always in the center.

And then it sounds like the tom is on the left and the floor tom is on the

right.

So we're going to mimic that with these toms here.

So I'm going to pan tom 2 a little more to the left, tom 4 a little more to the

right, because I like a big wide spread on the toms.

Let me un -solo everything.

These toms are ringing a little long, so I'm going to open and get piece

controls and turn down the sustain a little bit.

Something here, because we don't want those kind of rolling and bleeding into

the next phrase.

We just want them to kind of get done with quickly.

We still want them to ring, but just not too long.

Now let's dive into all the effects. EQ, compression, and saturation.

If you don't know anything about this, I'm going to go really slow on the first

drum and start to speed up as I progress.

So I'm actually going to start on the snare and turn this on, and now a lot of

things have popped up. Whatever you're using, it's going to be different, but

you'll be able to find similar things.

So I'm going to start with EQ.

With drums, there's a couple things that are really important to manage.

So we want to watch out for low -end build -up, but we need to make sure we

the fundamental low -end, which is where the drum hits the hardest. It's like

the bass of the instrument, and then there's always some stuff in the mids.

gets out of control.

Some mud or boxy or papery sounding sounds we need to take out. And then

details on the top that we want to make sure we accentuate. I know that's a lot.

I'm going to explain it one thing at a time.

Okay, if you look at this, right here is our fundamental low end. If I boost

this, that sounds good. That has nice punch and power.

Below that is not good.

It's more airy, woofy, and that's going to get in the way of the kick.

It actually makes the snare kind of sound like a kick. So what I like to do

is pull the low roll off. This is called a high pass, low cut filter.

And we're going to pull it up until this point.

And some of you might be upset that I'm mixing with my eyes right now.

but I'm doing this so that you see and can put a visual with the things we're

hearing.

Generally, I recommend just listening and using your ears.

So I'm going to move this up. Some high -pass filters have what's called a

resonant hump, and you can actually pull them up by adjusting the Q, and this is

going to boost right before you cut.

And I really like to do this because it's one move that handles the low

and boost.

that low end that we want to add more of.

So I'm going to pull this to here.

So now we have dual control over making sure the super lows aren't getting in

the way, and we have a nice area we can adjust to add more or less of the good

lows.

Here's without it.

Here's with it.

It's subtle.

A lot of what we're going to do here, we just want to add a little bit, and if

it's good, we'll do a little bit more.

Another note is the bigger these mountains and valleys are in the EQ, the

modern it's going to sound.

So if you want something to sound smooth and vintage and a little more old

school, keep these moves less aggressive, smaller.

But if you want this to sound really modern and polished, like a metal or...

or rock or like cutting edge country then you're going to make these bigger

that makes sense. Third thing we want to look for because we handled the low

build up and the good lows is the nastiness in the middle of the mud.

To do this I grab another band and we want kind of a wider cue to start.

The wider this is the more frequencies you're affecting and the smaller it is

the less frequencies you're affecting.

So I like to start wider and then I can adjust the taste from there. But what

we're going to do is boost and check around this mid area as low as 500 up to

1kHz and find the stuff that just sounds awful.

Any drum close mic has this, I guarantee it, and you just need to find where it

is and pull it down.

That's not good.

That's not good either.

That kind of stuff is just awful. So we're going to pull it out.

And again, the more of this we pull out, it's going to sound more modern, more

polished.

And the more we leave it, the more kind of open, old school it's going to sound.

So just find the balance for what you're going for.

Like something like that.

The last thing we want to do is find some good top end and enhance it. With

Stair specifically,

There's usually something good between 2 and 4k, and then there's usually

something good on top between like 8 and 10k. I'm going to search those two

areas with kind of a medium cue here.

That sounds pretty good. Let me also check the top.

Pull that down.

So let me turn this off.

Turn it back on.

Okay that's the first step. So next I'm going to move on to compression and

distortion. Compression is more important than distortion but this

both so we're going to tweak them both a little bit. Turn it on.

Turn on compression.

Ratio I always like to do either three or four to one. I'll do three to one

today. Ratio is basically When the sound exceeds the threshold, how much is that

sound going to be reduced? By what ratio?

3 to 1 is just a good natural sounding one, and since these are software drums,

we're not dealing as much with the inconsistencies of a real human, so we

need to be aggressive with our compression.

It's more to add that powerful snap kind of sound that we're used to hearing.

The attack control is really important, but often misunderstood.

The lower the control is set, the faster the attack is.

and so this means when the sound comes in and exceeds the threshold how quickly

is that compressor going to engage and clamp it back down the slower we set

attack the more snap we actually get in the sound so i'm going to pull the

threshold down until we start getting some compression and then i'll open up

slow down the attack so you hear that start to come through

My ear always hears this start to come in around 16 to 20 milliseconds.

Slower than that, you're not quite getting enough of it.

Hear how it kind of sounds scoped out?

And then if I turn this up, we start to get more.

Release does the opposite of attack.

So attack is handling the start of the note, the punch, the transient, and

release is handling the end.

and so the longer we set this release the longer the compressor is going to

on to that gain reduction that compression generally i like to set this

like the compressor to be fully released and done before the next hit happens

so

up here it's almost too much it's kind of choking out the note but if we have

faster

it kind of gets in and out in time.

All right, next I'm going to engage this distortion, and now I don't love the

term distortion for this because I'm not looking for a distortion sound, but

rather I'm looking for color. So color is really some sort of saturation or

sauce you can add to your drums to help them pop and be more exciting. Addictive

Drums has different things here. I really like tube pair or transformer.

These are a little more give you that analog sound where some of these like

heavy are just a lot. I'll show you what heavy sounds like.

If you want to get experimental you can do that but I prefer a little more

natural sounding here.

So there's an amount and a mix and I'm just going to mess with these until we

get something that sounds cool.

That's not cool.

And just because it doesn't sound good where the amount's at doesn't mean you

can't use it. You might just need to pull the mix down.

Having the mix at 0 means you're getting 0 % of that sound, and having it at 100

means you're getting 100 % of the transformer sound.

Here's without it.

Here's with it.

Just kind of gives it a little something extra.

Next is tape and shape. So these are two other things I like to do to drums.

Tape is going to give you that hitting tape sound.

I know that's hard to describe, but that's a popular sound. Just I would

recommend messing with it and seeing if you like it. And then shape is going to

be a transient designer, so I'll explain that in a second. So for tape, I

usually just like to add a little bit.

Too much, and it gets to be too much.

You can mess with bottom, but this is going to start to mess with your low end

here.

I just like to put a little bit on there. Here's without it.

Here's with it.

Just like a little extra sauce.

And then here's shape. So a transient designer works similar to how a

does when you have it dialed right.

and you can adjust the individual like how much smack on the attack of the drum

do i want and how much sustain how much ringing out do i want it to have so i'll

really exaggerate these so you can hear what it's doing so here's the attack so

pay attention to right when the drum hits

it's that

powerful smack sound if i pull it the other way it's going to start to suck

out

I usually just like to add a little bit.

Sustain will do the opposite, and this is going to affect the tail or the

ringing of the drum.

So if you push this higher, it actually extends it, which I don't really care

for. So I'm going to pull this back a little bit.

Kind of tightens things up.

So let me turn all this off and turn it back on so you can hear.

Here's with it.

The last thing that Addictive Drums has that I enjoy is called saturation.

And what this is basically doing is soft clipping. And if you're not familiar

with soft clipping, it's when a sound gets too loud on the levels, it actually

gently just rolls off that top.

It makes me think of slicing off cheese, like a slice of cheese. It just kind of

cuts the top, but it does it in a pleasing way.

So the more I pull the threshold down, it's actually going to clip the top of

this drum and keep it from getting too loud.

So you'll notice when this is off,

we're hitting close to minus nine.

I'm going to turn this on, pull it down some.

It's actually pulled our peak back down to minus 12 where we wanted it, and it's

not losing any perceived volume because you're still getting that aggressive

impact. It's just kind of, it's soft clipped a little bit. So I really enjoy

that. Here is nothing.

Here is everything.

That sounds way better to me. The reason I did it all on one is because now we

can copy and paste this and tweak it and it'll be a much faster setup and a more

consistent sound between all of our drums.

So I'm going to copy all channel insert effects settings and come over to kick

and paste all channel insert effects settings.

And now we are like ready to go. We already have our starting point. We just

need to tweak some of these to match the drum we're now mixing.

The fundamental of kick, the bass, is way lower. So we need to find that and

adjust it.

Sometimes it sounds just terrible. Let me turn these off.

To me this sounds really good right around 50.

Let's check the mud.

There's a lot in there.

I'm also going to check a little bit lower and just make sure there's nothing

muddy that we don't like.

Like that's quite suitable.

Check these top points.

I like that.

Let's engage this distortion way too much, so we're going to really pull this

back down.

Not all distortion or color plugins have this, but there's a focus, and this

will actually tell it where to distort.

So by pulling this above about 100 hertz, which would be around right here,

basically saying, hey, we're going to distort above this point, but we're not

going to mess with this, because this is what's making that yucky distorting

sound.

Now we can go over to tape, add that drive.

Now is where the bottom on the tape is really nice because it'll fatten up the

bottom of the kick.

And check tape.

And saturation.

Great. Let's hear it with the snare.

Great. At this point, now that you kind of understand what's going on, I'm going

to open up the whole kit and start to do this a lot faster. The other only

important elements to do this much processing to are the toms, and then

stuff like the hi -hat and the overheads and room we're going to do a lot less

and be a little more gentle with.

Let me find the toms here.

Let me paste.

Oh, that's awful.

Pull this focus up, mixing the amount down.

So same thing, we need to find the bottom here.

Right about here.

If it's too low, it's going to get thumpy.

If it's too high, it won't have the right bottom.

So just try to find that sweet spot.

Somewhere in there, that's not good.

We'll check this top.

I actually don't like that, so I'm not going to boost it. And then the very

Something like that.

Everything else can stay how it is. Let me copy this.

Move to tom4, which is the only other one we're using. Paste all.

and make adjustments.

Something sounds like a basketball on this, Tom, so I'm going to try to find

that and get rid of it.

Sounds like those dodgeballs from gym class that just, oof, I don't like it.

and now these are way too loud so i'm just going to turn them down a little

and let's hear it in contact

and i'm going to pull the sustain down on both of these just so they

get out of the way faster nice okay hi -hat

some drum plugins give you an option for a hi -hat close mic which is what this

is other times you just have to deal with what you hear in the room but

the hi -hat close mic can be really abrasive and can be too much so let me

this on you can kind of hear

they're

too loud and it actually feels like it pulls it out of the room and puts it

right in your face which i don't like

And then I also want to solo up the overhead and hear where this is panned

placed in the overhead.

Over there.

I just try to balance it between the two so it has a little bit of enhancement

from the close mic, but it's not anything crazy in the way.

And now you might think I'm crazy, but all I do here is just get rid of lows.

This is not doing anybody any favors.

I don't compress it, I don't saturate, it's just it's such a small source it's

not worth spending time on.

Overheads.

I like to control low end because it's important for all that low end to just

come directly from the kick.

We don't want to boost much of that.

And actually roll off a little bit of highs here, just to keep it a little

contained, and it'll help it sit better in the rest of your mix.

And that's all I do there. Maybe some compression.

Actually keep the attack really fast here, because I want the main smack and

transient to come from the close mic, not the overheads.

And now I'm moving on to the room. It's going to be a really similar process.

Clean up the low end a bit.

Clean up the high end a bit.

I just want some gentle compression for kind of control and give it some vibe.

So let me un -silo everything now.

Now let's put it in the track.

Kick is actually a little too boomy, so let's tweak that.

It needs a little more top so I'm going to do this and I'm going to leave that

with a little more of these.

My bass is too loud.

The hums are still too loud, we'll pull them a bit more down.

Now is when you can play with your room mic again and figure out how big you

want the kit to sound.

talk about drum buss now. Drum buss is your total sound of your drums mixed and

processed, and it's an additional layer of processing that happens on top. So in

addictive drums, all of these close mics, all of these overhead room and

they go to the master.

So I'm going to do a very similar process again.

Turn this on. We could be a lot gentler now because think of it as doing it to

every single piece of the drums.

That made it louder so I'm going to pull down this output trim.

We can put just a little bit of tape on here.

And I might just boost a little bit of highs to give it some sparkle.

That's probably all I'll do. It's really gentle.

We're doing what we can to get just a little more out of our drum sound.

It's actually adding a ton of volume.

Okay.

bus. This is where I like to do parallel compressing. So if I can set it up

within the drum plugin, sometimes I'll do that.

Other times I'll have to either do multi -output or apply it to the actual panel

within the DAW. I'll show you a different way to do this on the second

Drum Mix. So I'm going to turn all these on, and the goal of this, let me send

kick, snare, toms, I think we're only doing two and four, and then less of the

hi -hat.

overhead, and room, and I'll show you why in a second. And the goal here is

to make it hit really hard. We're going to use compression, color distortion,

and tape, maybe saturation, to make this hit you in the face.

All right, compression.

I'm going to do probably a four to one so it's a little more aggressive, and we

want enough attack for that smack to get through.

And see how this is making the cymbals just get crazy loud? So I'm going to

the hi -hat back, pull the overhead and room back some more, because we don't

want to get those out of control.

In fact, I might just pull them out.

Just a little bit.

Let me do distortion.

I want to find something that just sounds fun

cool

i'm not going to do anything with eq let's add some tape

All right, let me mess with saturation too.

You can kind of see this light up when we're hitting that ceiling, and it's

rolling off the top.

I know this sounds extreme, this doesn't sound good, and so what you need to do

is pull the fader all the way down, play your drums, and then just bring it back

in a little bit.

here's without it here's with it

here's in the context of the track without the parallel compression

here's with it

So you can see how big of a difference that makes for that. The last thing for

drum mix is dealing with space as far as reverb.

We get some space from the room, but I like to additionally add more space with

reverb just because it gives it additional colors and interest within

So Addictive Drums has two send effects, and that's generally all I'll use if

I'm mixing outside of Addictive Drums as well. These are weird because they

could be delay and reverb.

but I almost always just use the reverb. The first one I like to be as much of a

regular room sound as I can. So I'm going to send it to all of these and

send these. And the goal is to make this sound, like I said, as much as like the

room as you can. So solo up the room.

We want something that sounds kind of like that. So I'm going to solo this up.

And let's see, room.

We can mess with things like pre -delay, decay.

We're just going to tweak it until we get something that sounds cool.

And again, the bigger you want your drums to sound, the bigger this room

be. And if you want to go for more of a dialed back, you know, lo -fi kind of

sound, then you want a smaller room.

Because this will get up to like a Reno Rock.

So something like this is good.

Damp is the control that'll roll off the highs, so that kind of helps it to sit

better under the original drums.

The takeaway here, you know, I'm just reaching for controls and turning them,

and if I like how it sounds, I add more. If I don't like how it sounds, I do

less. It's not as much of a...

I mean, some of it is knowing, you know, what I want, but a lot of it is

experimentation and using your ear. Does that sound better? Does that sound

worse? And going from there.

One thing that is more of a non -negotiable on reverbs is to roll off

because you don't want that conflicting with your kick drum.

And I'll also roll off the highs a little bit here.

And now, same thing we did with the buss, I'm going to turn it all the way

and blend it back in.

Sometimes I'll even send less kick to this because it can muddy up your kick

drum if you're not careful.

All right, next I'm going to dial in a second one and usually my second reverb

like to be bigger and use it just for snare and maybe toms. So I'm going to

snare there and a little bit of these toms and that's it.

So same thing, I'll turn this down and blend it back in. The idea of this

reverb is just to make this snare sound massive.

So here's without those effects.

Here's with them.

That is everything I would do to mix completely in the software The nice

about this is it it's done now. It is completely You have one channel in your

DAW to deal with the volume of your drums and other than that you're done so

depending on your level of Like how much control you want on it this you might

really enjoy this because it's done. You don't have to worry about it

beginning here.

So hopefully that gives you an idea of how to mix completely within the drum

plugins you have.

If you have addictive drums, again, this will be available in my asset pack on

my website. I will remove the kit pieces so you can just load up all of the

processing and go from there.

If you have not seen the previous parts of these videos, I'll put them up here

so you can get caught up and up to speed with where I'm at. If you'd like to get

the asset pack for this course, I have that available on my website for a small

fee, and that just goes to help support me in providing this course to you free

of charge. So thank you to those of you who have purchased it, and if you're

considering purchasing it, thank you. To get you up to speed with where I'm at

in the session, if you've been following along, I had opened the Liverpool Plus

Kit from the Logic Library.

So if you don't have this, go over to the Logic Library, and you want to go to

Drum Kit, Multi -Channel Kits, and load up Liverpool.

The problem that arises with this, if you hit X to open the mixer on this

Liverpool Plus, you get a whole bunch of mixing that's already done for you. So

if you're newer, maybe you'd consider leaving all this because it is a good

starting point, but I don't personally like the way this is set up. So what I

did is removed all the plugins, all the sends, and some extra things so if you

want to follow along exactly go ahead and highlight from liverpool plus open

stack come all the way over here select all of them and we're going to start

taking these off no plugin no plugin we're just pulling out rows of plugins

same thing on the send so we're going to click these two arrows no send

no send

Always having a hard time with that one.

No send. No send. We're also going to remove kick, snare, sub, attack, crunch,

punch, and plate. I'm just going to come over here, options, nope, edit, delete.

It's going to say something, delete tracks and content, and then these

right here, kick in, kick out, snare top, snare bottom, we want to change the

bus output to match whatever this number is.

So your main track here has been pre -assigned to a bus it's probably not 38

it's probably different for you but if you notice everything else in here is

going to 38 except for these these were going to a couple other things that we

deleted so we're just going to set these back to the liverpool plus 38 right

there oh also i'm going to get rid of tambourine shaker and hand claps we're

doing anything with those and i like to keep it clean once you've done that

you're caught up to what i did in prep for this which is i have my logic drums

here And I'm just going to delete what I was working with. And then I have my

MIDI that I programmed earlier on here. It should be somewhere sounding like

this.

All right. At this point, I'm going to work mostly in the mixer window now. So

we're going to use the hotkey X for that. We're going to use it a lot

this process.

I'm going to start just like I did on the other one. Start treating my snare,

specifically snare top, if you're in a multi -mic situation.

and then start to apply that processing to the other channels. So let's just

pull up snare top here and see where we're at. I'm going to set this, make

this main one is at zero so we can keep an eye on the volume overall.

Before I start EQing, I'm going to take a quick second to just make sure this is

all gain stage because I feel like it's too loud.

It is.

Okay, now let's dive into some snare.

These processes are going to be really similar to what we did when we mixed

within Addictive Drums.

These things are going to be in different places, and I'll show you when

use third -party plugins and that kind of thing if you have them. So my go -to

for this is an SSL -style channel strip.

If you do not have this, I'll also recreate it with regular EQ and

That's all we're using from this. I just like how this sounds, and it has

exactly what I need and nothing more. We're going to start.

rolling off the low end here so right there it's been

we

got that low end back we cannot control the q or the that little resonant hump

on our high pass here so i have to use a low band to add that in so i'm going to

switch it to bell mode shelf mode boost at the frequency all the way down for

the low and bell is just a specific hump so i'm going to hit bell and try to

find that that oomph of the snare i'm going to boost it sweep around until it

sounds good i like

that right there just add a little bit of it next we're going to remove our mud

in the mid range

pretty good.

Next we're going to look for the two spots I like to boost in the highs.

So that would be somewhere kind of in the high mids.

Just a little bit there.

and a little bit on the top.

If you look over here we already have some compression happening but I'll show

you how I like to get it dialed in and that type of thing. So I always like

ratio of three to one because it's just a good balanced thing.

Release is all the way fast which is at about 100 milliseconds.

Release is as fast as it can go for whatever this plugin has as fast as I

picked that.

And then for threshold we just want about three decibels of gain reduction.

So this is kind of starting to hit six so we're gonna raise this threshold so

it's just about three.

So we just want to be tapping that first light. You want to make sure fast

attack is off because if you turn fast attack on you're going to kill that

transient.

Finally, I like to just turn it off, turn it back on, make sure I'm not

too much sound.

So I'm adding a little bit. I'll just pull this down a hair.

This is the main output gain level there.

Cool. I'm going to show you how to do the same thing with stock plugins now.

we're going to click right here to just open up a regular channel EQ.

Same process. We're going to treat the lows.

Roll them off.

Little resonant hump there.

Gonna get rid of the muddy mids.

We're gonna boost some high mids, find like the the snap of the drum.

And boost some top end.

For compression, I will load just a regular compressor.

My personal favorite with Logic is the Studio VCA, but you can use whatever you

have, and we'll just need a tweak to taste.

So same thing, ratio 3 to 1, attack we're going to play with, release is set

pretty fast, and we'll just go from there.

About 3 decibels of gain reduction.

So if your meter looks kind of like this, and you have a 5, then you want to

just count, you know, 1, 2, 3. So right around this area is where we want to be

compressing, give or take.

So again, too fast, it eats the transient.

But as we open this up, right around 16 or 18, we can start to hear it.

Something like that.

And something, again, with release, you just don't want it holding on so long to

where it's not done compressing before the next note starts, if that makes

sense. So you want this to be all the way back to zero before the next note

hits.

See, that's too much. So somewhere in here, just in and out.

If it's too fast, it just doesn't work right. So somewhere 50 to 100

milliseconds is great.

So here's without those.

Here's with them.

Here's my SSL channel.

Really similar.

They're, you know, they're slightly different because different flavors, but

that's the gist of it there.

Next I'm going to go ahead and apply that EQ and compression to everything,

start to get it tweaked, and then we can mess with the color and saturation and

some of those other fun things.

So we're going to go to pick next.

Definitely going to get rid of this low cut.

Flatten all these back out.

I'm using option click.

That's generally a hotkey to just reset something to its default. So you could

just go around and click knobs and option click them and they'll go back to

their default.

Compressing is the right amount.

We want to find the good low end.

I'm going to get rid of some mids.

Listen to some high mids, see what we want to do.

I'm actually going to cut here. I'm going to go more of a narrow cue and cut

because this has a texture I don't like.

and then

find a good

spot to add some ties back in there

without

it with it the same thing i'll show you how to do this with regular EQ and

compression that

Might mess with some of these low mids.

Have a lot going on there and we'll boost some highs.

Same thing we're going to compress next.

Maybe you noticed that right when I opened this up it was perfect.

Everything was right kind of where I wanted it.

and so that's a little pro tip for you is if there's a certain set of settings

you know you always go for go ahead and dial them in and then most DAWs in

software can do this where you save it as a default for me i always know i like

ratio at 3 to 1 and attack at 15 and release around 50.

it's a really close starting point and so then i'll go up here and save this as

default and then every time you open it up it's right there ready to go it saves

so much time and helps you get a more consistent sound

Here's the SSL channel.

Here's stock.

Just to prove that you can. Either way, you can do it either way.

Okay, next we have a snare bottom and a kick in mic.

These to me are more supportive, more auxiliary, extra sound sources rather

bread and butter. So your kick out and your snare top, that's bread and butter.

That is...

If you only have one mic on each of those, that's what you want.

The other two, they're more for extra color and flavor and taste and that kind

of thing. We're going to do the same process but it's not going to be quite

intense because they are more of an extra sound source.

So I'm just going to copy over what I have here.

And for snare bottom, in my opinion, you don't need to get the lows.

from this the low frequencies because you're already getting them from the

top the thing that the snare bottom adds is that sizzle that kind of splash of

the snares on the bottom i'm going to get rid of this low boost we're just

to make sure there's nothing nasty happening like that

pull that out and then i'm going to just be a little more aggressive with my

boost here on the top

So we've got a little more splashy fun happening.

That's about it.

Kick in, kick out.

Relationship is similar. The kick in is just aiming to give you more click and

definition.

So the same thing, I'm going to copy this over.

And similarly, I don't need low end from this one.

So I'm not going to boost it. I'm not going to roll it off, but I'll just

it how it is.

And it is best practice to listen to these together.

I'm going to press this one just a little more.

Alright, here's without any of those.

Here's with them.

Tightens it up, adds that magic and polish.

Let's start bringing in all the kit pieces now.

Alright, first order of business.

Let's listen to the overheads and make sure things are panned right.

This is actually opposite.

from what you'd expect. So this is called listener perspective, where it

as though you're looking at the drums. So if you are looking at a drum kit, the

hi -hat's going to be on this side, because you're playing over here. And if

you're the other way, that side.

And then your toms and stuff are going to go down that way.

That is listener perspective.

Drummer perspective is the other way, where you're looking down at the drum

and your hi -hat's over here.

toms, rides, stuff like that. Let me tell you this, the only people that care

about the panning perspective of drums are drummers. I usually just do drummer

perspective because I've never had a non -drummer say, hey, that's not the right

way. But all the time the drummer's like, hey, the hi -hat shouldn't be over

there, it's over here.

But for the sake of this, we'll leave it listener perspective because I don't

want to go deal with all of that. If you do want to deal with all of that, you

can simply add a game plugin on this whole Logic Drum Master here and swap

left and right.

That'll just completely reverse everything if you need to do that. Most

should have a way to reverse left and right.

But listen to this. The hi -hat's over on the right, so we're going to pan our

hi -hat a little more that way.

Big difference there on the toms. Let's listen.

Okay, so the high tom is pretty far on the right, and the low tom goes way over

to the left.

Here's without the close mics for listen for placement.

Here's with them.

I usually like to place these really wide.

Cool.

And high tom, if we use it, is going to be further to the right than the mid

tom.

I do want to say right now, you know, you might be thinking, man, that snare

really thick and chunky and, you know, maybe that's not the sound you want for

your track.

That's where I would point you back to drum selection.

It's important in the mix that we're not trying to reinvent the sound of any of

the kit pieces.

We're just trying to enhance them, make them sit better in the mix, just sound

better overall.

If you want maybe a high ringy snare, it's near impossible to mix this snare

to sound like that. If that's the case, you just need to switch out the snare. I

would recommend before you even get into mixing, and that's why I covered it in

part three instead of now, switch the kit pieces.

Just get the drum sounding how you want before you mix anything.

All right, let's add some room in there.

And some leak.

Okay, hi -hat like I did before. I'm just going to roll off some low end.

No sense using expensive CPU -heavy plugins for this. Just grab whatever you

have, get rid of the lows. Toms, we're going to use the same strategy we did.

I'm just going to copy over the snare EQ and the snare compression, and we'll

tweak from there.

compression it's a little much

great usually when i'm

mixing i like to once i mix one of the toms you can take that exact processing

and copy it to the next one and just lower the frequencies i found that's the

fastest most consistent all the good things

Get that compression over there.

Great. Let's hear that.

Hold that down. I'm getting loud.

Alright, overheads.

I'll pop back to using the SSL channel strip for this.

It doesn't super matter what you use, this is just my preference.

We're going to clean up lows here.

And we're going to compress, but we're going to do the fast attack this time.

I'm already letting the attack through on the close mic, so I want to just keep

things nice and clean, so I'll close that up.

One of the other benefits to compressing the overheads with a fast attack like

this is we're actually pulling down those really smacky things like the

and the toms, and that'll let our cymbals kind of breathe a little more

they're not kind of competing for space as much, if that makes sense.

I'm going to pull down highs a little bit and just see if there's any mud here

that I don't like.

Symbols usually have a frequency between like 3 and 500. It's just awful.

That kind of thing.

Sounds like an Antarctica documentary of like wind rushing or something.

Alright, similar processing to room. This time I'll do it with stock stuff

so you can see.

It's all the same.

some highs bring some of that up

and compression we're going to go fast attack so i'm going to do something

like six this time slow this down just a bit

leak

all i'm going to do is roll off lows

You usually don't have a channel for leak like this usually it's in the

Channel processing so I don't want to do anything crazy to this because it'll

just start to get weird

Let me thumbs up a little bit.

Okay, next thing I'd like to add some sort of color and saturation as well as

transient enhancement. We'll pop back to our snare.

I go back and forth on tools for this, but my favorite third -party one is

FabFilter Saturn.

This, if you're not familiar with it, it is a multi -band saturator. So you can

actually come in and create different sections that you saturate differently.

I like to do one crossover at about a thousand and then another one around

thousand.

And this will let you leave your low band completely alone.

I use warm tape and then band two and three I'm going to increase drive to add

more texture and color.

That's top sizzle.

This is going to be mid -sizzle.

I'll apply that to a couple different things, maybe like snare bottom.

Kick.

I'm going to turn them off.

Okay, put them on.

My stock plugin recommendation would be the Chromaglow.

Logic's Chromaglow.

A really similar thing. Let me see, I'll start with it on snare.

Let's see the model here.

do retro tube or analog preamp might be good

i

like

that i'm going to bypass below a certain point maybe about 120 is good keep that

low end clean if this isn't here you start to get that like

It's almost like an oscillating type of sound. It's not really pleasing.

Cleans it up a little bit, and I'll pull this fix down a bit as well.

And without it, with it.

And this is also doing a little bit of that soft clipping or saturation, as

Addictive Drums called it, where it's actually helping with that peak from not

getting too high, kind of rolling off.

slice of the cheese type of thing

i'm

going to move that to all my close mics here

Here's without it.

Here's with it.

Here's without it.

Here's Saturn.

I think I like glow better than Saturn. Look at that.

Let me get glow on these toms. I'll use the same exact processing I did for the

snare.

Ooh, that wasn't... Okay, it's just a one -time thing.

Alright, transient control.

So my favorite, Native Instruments makes one called the Transient Master.

I also like to use, Waves has one called TransX Multi, and it's also a multi

-band processing, but it's for transient design.

I'm going to go with the Native Instruments one, though, because it has

attack and sustain.

So push the attack a little bit, pull the sustain back a little bit. If you

to use stock stuff, I'd recommend the Enveloper.

Basically, you have your attack amount here and your release here.

I'm going to stick with my transient master.

I just prefer that. It's easier to use and sounds better to my ear than the

envelope.

I'm definitely going to put this on the toms because they are getting out of

control on the ringing.

Also where we could go and change the damp level in the plugin.

There's a constant balancing struggle between the close mics and the room, and

once you add the band in there, that kind of changes the relationship. So

just got to keep tweaking it until it feels like it's the right size to your

ear.

Okay, next we're going to do the drum master processing, and then we're going

get into parallel compression and reverb.

Drum master, that would be this guy here, the track stack, folder, whatever

want to call it, that all your drums are living in, not the overhead channel.

I know this is where your plugin lives, but that is not the drum master. Once

you commit to multi -output mode, that original plugin is just, in this

instance, the overheads. I like to do two things here.

Number one,

compression.

I like the SSL comp, and I'll show you a stock solution as well in a second.

I like 30 to 1, fast release, ratio 4 to 1, click to taste.

If the attack is too fast, it eats all the impact of your drum.

I'm hearing something weird. Hmm.

What is that?

Something ringing right there

Okay, next I like some sort of color EQ.

My favorite is Shep 73.

It's like a Neve -style three -band with a low roll -off, which I'm going to

use. And it has a preamp, so we can juice this preamp to get a little more

color.

It's subtle.

Definitely subtle.

It's getting a little loud here.

I'm just going to add a little bit of color on top.

I also like this 10k right here.

Maybe 7k sounds better here.

I would also at this point do an additional layer of saturation, so glow

be a fun one to do again.

Less is more here, so we're gonna be careful That

sounds really good though

Do that. I'm going to bypass below 120.

Oh, colorful.

Oh, that's good right there.

I'm going to pull this mix down something crazy like 20, way lower.

Without it.

With it.

If you wanted a third -party thing that does that, I'd probably do like Magma BB

tubes by Waves.

It has two different saturation controls, Beauty and Beast, and then

bass relief to kind of do that same bypass below function where we're not

distorting bass off of the low end.

I'm liking glow today.

All right, next is parallel compression.

So we're going to create a new bus, send all the drums there, and then really

smash that bus.

Oh, before I go there, I want to show you some stock alternatives for the bus

and compression I did on these drums.

So for compression, again, Logic Compressor will work great.

But the Vintage VCA model is what I like to use, and I match it exactly to how I

set up the SSL bus compressor.

So attack around 30, release around 100.

Again,

I'm aiming for like 2 to 3 decibels of gain reduction here. Not much, just

taking the edge off.

And an alternative to step 73 for Logic would be the console EQ, vintage console

EQ.

It's actually the same emulated EQ, which is nice.

And we have a drive knob too.

This one has some sort of mid quality that just punches right through.

So either of those will work just fine for you. I'm going to stick with what I

know it's like here.

Okay, let me check it in the mix before we move on.

Okay, the snare has this issue which I can only refer to as sneezy.

It's like a kind of sound.

And it's in the high end, so I might just not boost there.

No, we're just going to do a tiny bit, but not much.

If you want more top end, you can always get there by adding more snare bottom.

That's one of the nice things once you start to have multiple mics, you can

add more of the mic that gives the character you want.

Okay, now I'm going to send all of these to a bus. So I'm going to highlight all

of this.

Come here and just pick bus one.

And I'm going to option click to send them all at Unity.

That might be different depending on what you're using. But now we have a new

bus over here.

And we'll call this Para.

And now if we solo this up and hit play, we should hear our full kit in there.

Great. Now we can smash it, destroy it.

make it hit really hard my go -to for this is the distressor from uad because

just hits

I turned on this. This is the detector high -pass filter, so it's not going to

compress based on the low end that it hears, which I like. And then I just was

playing around with these and added some distortion.

A lot of sound.

I'm going to pull down my overheads, hi -hat, room, and leak, because I don't

like those being too strong in the parallel compressor.

Pull up my good friend Chromaglow and we're going to smash it again.

So I actually like this squeeze model here because it is emulating even more

compression. So I'm just going to put that on there too, but maybe not a ton

it.

Maybe not. Maybe retro tube is it.

Here's with none of those effects on there.

Here's with all of them.

Just every single one is hitting you.

That's what you want to hear.

Okay, turn it back on, pull this down, and we're going to blend it into taste.

Great. Basically, the goal here is to make another source that sounds like the

room mic, but different. I'm going to send a little less kick there because I

think it makes it muddy. Maybe like a minus five.

And then over on broom, my favorite for this is true verb from waves.

shorten that decay done perfect

and

that sounds big one thing i forgot to mention was a stock plug -in alternative

for this uh distressor so i'll do that for you real quick i would just use any

any stock compressor you want is fine but something aggressive if you have a

studio fat model great if not whatever you have is fine and we just want it to

hit hard so slower attack faster release you can push the ratio all the way up

to like eight to one if you want

and

that'll do the same thing

That's a stock alternative for you.

Stock alternative for the room reverb.

You can do anything Logic has really. I really like the chroma verb.

and we'll just go to rooms and start i like that

shorten it down

and

we just don't want the lows getting out of control on either one so i'll usually

come in here and roll off some lows take some highs out

Great, next I'm going to do another reverb. This is kind of a bigger one,

for the snare and the toms, exactly like I did it on the other version as well.

So here we go, sending to bus 3, and send it.

And we'll call this Hall.

This one, you can do multiple things to get it there.

I always...

just poke around and play with stuff. I really like Super Plate from... what are

they called?

Sound Toys.

I like that.

Sorting it down some more.

You got to be careful because this will get you into like 80s drums territory

really fast, so less is more when you're doing this kind of thing.

Other alternatives, I've been enjoying the Big Sky from Strymon lately, so we

could probably get more of a Hall sound with this.

Just click on Hall.

No pre -delay.

Shorten this down.

Other stock alternative for logic, again, chroma is great. You can't go

with chroma verbs.

And we'll just find something that's a little more hall sounding.

Hall or plate. I go back and forth on what I want here.

I'll also use a gated verb sometimes if I do want that 80s sound. This is really

just experiment and find what you like.

That's like reverb -y.

I don't like that one

Another good Logic one is the Phase Decider.

There's a lot of good ones in here too.

Like that one already sounds better than Chroma.

We'll just do a medium hall, nice hall.

Great. Shorten this length a bit.

This is why, right here, why I like to roll off the highs.

To me...

the highs just catch my ear and it makes me hear that it's like a an artificial

reverb kind of thing so i try to roll those off as best i can i

think my favorite though is this big sky

We're getting loud again, so I'm going to grab this guy and just pull him down

bit.

So real quick, I'm going to turn everything off so you can just hear the

difference that we've done.

and turn it all back on here.

Here we found a little too top -end heavy.

Overall I think it's just a little wet, so I'm going to pull down my two reverbs

here.

That wraps up part four and a half or four B or five or whatever you want to

call it of my MIDI drum production series. I really appreciate you for

and sticking around this whole time to those of you who have and to those who

have purchased the assets on my website. Thank you so much. That really helps me

to offset the cost of creating this and being able to provide it to you for

free. If you have any questions about the topics covered in this course or

like me to go into more detail for certain things, you can also email me at

at woodyardmusic .com. I would also like to hear your thoughts about this

course. If you enjoyed it, please let me know. If you have things you'd like to

see changed or done differently in the future, I'd love to hear from you. My

goal is to make courses as accessible and helpful as possible, so your

really does help me there. I genuinely hope that what I've covered in this

will help you get better sounding MIDI drums.

from A to Z all the way along the process.

You know, there's many different places that can hurt and help your MIDI drums,

and hopefully by taking this course and watching it, you've learned at least one

thing about MIDI drums and how to make them sound more lifelike.

Thanks again for watching.

I'd really appreciate it if you hit like and subscribe and share this with other

music producers.

Thanks so much for your time, and I'll see you on the next one.