Drums Mastering and Mixing

Drum and percussion tracks are among the most unforgiving ingredients in any mix. While a poorly recorded vocal or lead sound might survive on musical merits, poorly recorded drums are just bad drums, The track relies on them cutting through.

While they are important though, they're not as difficult to master as you might think – the only golden rule is not to pan the kick drum! If you're working with loops, a great way to take control of them is to split the individual elements and place each on its own channel, thus enabling you to change the level and sound of each one individually.

As with bass, the key with drums is to keep them punchy – avoid too much reverb, keep the tails short or gated, and don't be afraid to remove specific clashing hits. Try listening to the drums alone first then with everything else in: and then listen to everything without the drums. This way you can be sure your drums enhance rather than detract from the track.

STEP BY STEP Mixing real drums and breakbeats

1. The first thing we've done with our drum parts is separate them out onto their own tracks. If you've recorded ambience tracks then give these their own mixer channels now as well. We've set the volumes of each, leaving plenty of headroom, but we will need to adjust these throughout, each stage of the mix.

2. On our kick is a high-ratio compressor with 4.5ms Attack and 330ms Release, huge bass boost from the Sonic Maximize, and then a little more with a parametric EQ around 50Hz and 500Hz. Next comes a low cut at 75Hz, a Vintage Warmer with high Drive, and finally a very short reverse reverb.

3. We've put a low cut or our snare at 240Hz, and a short hall-style reverb to give it a live played sound. With a parametric EQ we've cut at around 50Hz, applied gentle wide boost at 500HZ, 45kHz and 17kHz, then added Sonic Maximization for real-life crispness. Fast Attack compression adds punch and volume.

4. Our closed hat sound is quite crisp so we've simply added some Sonic Maximization to the treble, a stereo spreader, a low cut at 460Hz, and a nice gated drum reverb. Then we've panned the sound slightly to the left to give our drums a sense of space.

5. To our open hi-hats we add nothing more than Sonic Masimlzer, a little subtle tape delay for movement, and a short-tailed, bright stereo reverb, We've left the stereo spreader off and instead panned the open hat about 14 clicks to the right creating a lively interaction with the closed hat.

6. Next we reroute the drums and process them together, first using a Vintage Warmer driven very hard on the Mix Finalize 3 setting. Then we've added bass boost and treble with the Sonic Maximizer. Finally, a little high- and mid-range widening and brick-wall limiting finishes things off, courtesy of Ozone 3.

STEP BY STEP Mixing electronic drums and loops

1. We start by adjusting the heaviest drum we have (which happens to be part of a loop). We've added some compression, but not too much, as it would ruin the loop's dynamics. We then add the Sonic Maximizer to boost the bass and treble and apply a low cut from 80Hz.

2. Next we layer our additional kick drums (adjusting start points where needed to avoid phasing). We've applied extremely high bass boost and used a very high compression Ratio and 4.5ms Attack. Then we've low cut from 1ЗОК2, as our main loop is very bass-heavy already.

3. Time to layer our next kick drum loop. This is set quite low with some compression and a low cut from lOOHz. It's mostly to add some more range to the kick, but it also has some nice hats, which Vintage Warmer softens, allowing us to brighten them with Sonic Maximizer.

4. Now we bring up our remaining loops. These are being used for their highly percussive qualities, so we insert a high-pass filter from 17OHz on each and apply some Sonic Maximizing. Some wide-Q EQ cut at 260HZ creates more gentle mid-range reduction, leaving more space for our non-percussive pans.

5. Our cymbal crashes and reversed cymbals are still dry, so we put them on separate channels and insert a high-pass at 6kHz on each. Our crash needs a huge reverb tall, so we load up our best reverb and make it so. Then we add a shorter reverb to the reversed cymbal.

6. We've chosen to add widening to the higher elements only (stereo bass is a no-no), but if you have a muttiband wldener you can add it to the kick drum loops too. We leave these alone though, as having some sounds and loops centred makes for a more interesting mix.