In part three of our short series on building a quality drum break, we'll be considering what to do once you get to the latter stages of the writing process - mixing down, editing and adding the final touches to your drum track.
First, to make things easy in the mixdown process, you should consider bussing your drum sounds. If you're using a lot of different elements - like with layered hits, or different types of percussion, this will help you control the overall level a lot more easily. It is often useful also, to have several 'pre' drum busses; perhaps one each for your kicks, the snares, the high end, and 'other' (bongos maybe) - which then feed into one 'main' drum buss. This will mean it's easier to change the level of the entire drum track when mixing, or quickly apply effects to the whole group.
So, once you've bussed your drums together, what to do? Oftentimes people talk about compressing everything together to help things 'gel'. The reason for this is because a busy drum beat will have to interact with the compressor - a hihat on it's own will sound loud; a hihat playing at the same time as a kick will be reduced in volume, as the compressor turns down the gain. So the various sounds in your beat will shift about in the mix, giving a movement that wasn't previously there.
Compression should be applied sparingly though; it is the quickest way to make a punchy drum track sound flat and lifeless. A fast attack and low threshold will smear all the transients from your beat, and lose all that funky feel. An envelope shaper or transient designer, placed on the buss, can help add in a little 'snap' back to your beat, but it shouldn't be used to make up for a badly used compressor. Keep that gain reduction down!
Reverb is another tool to help things sound 'together'. The point of reverb is to make something sound like it's 'in a space' and so by putting everything in the same space, it can sounds more coherent. Try applying a touch of reverb across your whole drum buss; something small, a reverb time of around 0.3s, mixed very quietly. It shouldn't really be very noticeable as reverb except when you mute and unmute it, but it will help give a cohesive sound.
Reverb can also be a creative tool - consider the huge dubstep snare sounds (long reverb, large pre-delay, just on the snare channel), or you could try experimenting with the pre-delay setting on your reverb plug to give a rhythmic effect (set it to equal one quaver, to give a pumping, off-beat sound, for instance). Remember to EQ your reverb returns though; nobody needs to hear 100Hz in a reverb tail, it doesn't add anything to the effect, but it can add muddiness. So cut things down to only that which is necessary for your track!
We did a whole article on parallel processing recently, so look out for that, but it can be most useful with drums - you can solve the issue of losing your transients through compression by sending your buss to another buss with a compressor (or limiter, tape saturator or distortion) and mixing that in quietly with your original signal. This way you can compress as hard as you like to get that smack from the drums, without losing the dynamics of your main drum track. It's an excellent tactic, when used carefully, to get more power and volume from your beats. Remember also, when parallel processing, that if you're going to EQ the new channel, you should use a linear phase EQ. The science is too complex for a short article like this, but basically, EQ's change the phase of a signal, and if you're having two drum channels playing at the same time, you could end up with phasing problems. A linear phase EQ, while not being a perfect solution, leaves the phase intact - so use these in preference on parallel processing.
Once you've got your beat sounding pretty crisp, you may even want to do a spot of resampling. This is more of a creative process, but can add interest to your overall track; bounce the drums down, and reintroduce them to your arrangement. Then you can chop things up for short fills, or go crazy with the FX, reverse a whole bar, and so on. IDM fans may want to get busy with a glitch plugin - dBlue's cunningly titled 'Glitch' is one of the industry standards - just set it up on your newly imported file, bounce the whole drum track with the plugin on it so you get 5 minutes of solid glitching, then chop that up and pick out the best bits. Easy!
Finally, then, how to mix? Well, this can't be answered from here - it depends on the kind of track you're writing. If it's a jungle track, then you want the drums to be centre stage, right up front. If you've got a vocal, poppy track on the go, then you need the drums to sit behind the vocal, while still having enough clout at the low end. So, it's hard to advise, but the main issue is that you need to consider the desired effect of the track, and mix accordingly.
As mentioned in part one, we could write for weeks on this subject and still not cover every angle. But hopefully this three-part overview has given you some inspiration to start firing up the sampler and getting busy with the beats. May the funk be with you...
