Add Edge to Your Drums

The presence and bite of professional drum recordings might be missing in your recordings. This desired tonal quality can be achieved in several ways. For instance, distortion is generally a good choice, and precisely, in this case, parallel distortion. In this article, we'll show you how to use the parallel distorted reverb technique to add an edge to your drums.

As usual, we'll listen to a short sequence created in SoundBridge: DAW. It contains most of the whole mix's elements.

As we can hear in the audio example above, the drums sound tight but lack a certain edge and a sense of space. To solve this, let's group all our drum tracks, except the kick, and name the newly created group track DRUMS.

Next, since we plan to process the drums in parallel, we'll need to add a new return track, which we will call "DRUMS - Parallel."

Moreover

Let's add plugins to our newly created "DRUMS - Parallel" return track. The reverb effect would be first in line. We chose Ice Reverb, a simple reverb effect in Native Instruments Maschine 2.

Once we're happy with the sound of the reverb, we'll add a distortion effect after it. For this, we have chosen Trash 2 by Izotope. Remember that the amount of distortion and reverb should be subtle for this kind of processing. Let's hear how it sounds.

The final effect in our "DRUMS - Parallel" return track will be an EQ, which we will use to control the processed signal and eliminate any annoying frequency peaks.

Finally, let's hear how the drum group sounds with and without parallel processing in the context of the whole mix.

If you liked this article on drum processing, here are some more on the same subject:

• Use Parallel Distortion to Spice Up Your Bass
• Tighten Up the Drums in Your Mix
• 3 Simple Steps to an Effective Drums and Percussion Tuning Strategy
• Get Vivid Drums by Using Harmonic Saturation