Bring Back The Impact: Drum Mastering

Drum Mastering Using Parallel Compression

You have probably come to this point while mixing your track: the more elements you add to your drums, the less impact they have. I will walk you through one way to counteract this parallel compression in this tutorial. Certain recording aspects make mixing more complicated when we talk about acoustic drums. For example, most acoustic drums are recorded using several microphones: some for the room sound, others for overheads, and one for each drum. Additionally, the mixed output of these mics has a lot of room for phase interactions caused by spill and slight timing differences. Therefore, this ultimately causes some aspects of the kit to lose their impact or punch.  

The Parallel Trick

One trick for counteracting this phenomenon and reinforcing impact and body in the mix is to use parallel compression. So, in this tutorial, we will show you how to do it right. First, we have a drum kit stem containing common elements like kick, snare, and hi-hats. In addition, the audio below is a rough mix of the elements exported to a single track. We prepared this in advance solely for demonstration's sake - let's listen to it.

Drums - Clean

Generally speaking, they sound okay. But, when played alongside a bass loop, the individual elements that make up the drum mix seem to lack impact. In essence, they are not particularly fat.

Drums and Bass - Clean

Solidify The Drums

So, let's try to fix this. In SoundBridge, we will make a new RETURN TRACK by clicking the "create return" button above the track list in the top-left portion of the sequencer window. Immediately, we will see a new track called RETURN 0 added to the bottom of the sequencer window (above the master) and in the mixer window. After creating the RETURN TRACK, please select it and drag a compressor onto its insert rack. We chose Solid Dynamics by Native Instruments, but you can use any plug-in compressor. Now, let's open the mixer window in SoundBridge. Here, we will see that each channel on the mixer was given a respective send fader for the return - just above the pan dial. Let's try dragging this slider up to 100 %.

When this step is complete, let's focus on the actual RETURN channel in the mixer window. On the compressor unit we added, adjust the settings like this.

1. Take the threshold way down (on our compressor, this means to the right - which seems counter-intuitive - so make sure you know which direction you're going).
2. Crank the ratio knob to something extreme (infinity will work).
3. Fast attack.
4. Slow release
   

Within this setup, we will gradually bring up the level of the RETURN TRACK. Consequently, this will allow us to hear the distinction between the clean signal and the heavily compressed signal and blend them the way we want. In this example, notice the drums seem fattened and glued together.

Drums - with Parallel Compression

All in all, there you have it - a standard parallel compression technique applied to a drum mix. Remember, this technique can be used - and is commonly used - on various instruments and sound sources. Finally, let's listen to the drums & bass together.

Kit and Bass - Context