Tighten Up the Drums in Your Mix

Drums are a cornerstone element in most modern dance mixes. They provide a lot of emotion and feel to a song without any melodic background. They're complex by nature and frequently span the whole audible frequency range. This makes mixing them challenging, often resulting in mixes with overwhelmingly present drums. In the following tutorial, we will show you a simple technique for treating this by tightening up and taming the drums to fit better with the rest of the mix.

We have prepared a short sequence in SoundBridge: DAW. It includes most of the elements of a full mix. Let's take a listen.

Gatekeeper for Tightening Drums

As you can hear from the example above, we've achieved a decent-sounding mix. However, the drum section is a little overwhelming and all over the place, especially in the high frequencies. We could try to fix this with some EQ and compression, but another technique could be more appropriate. Let's go into our "Drums Hi" group and insert a new instance of the "Gatekeeper" by Polyverse Music. First, though, let's hear how this group sounds solo and unprocessed.

Gatekeeper is essentially a gate effect with advanced options for volume modulation. It can work as an LFO, envelope, step sequencer, and more. We covered it in detail in one of our earlier tutorials, so we will not explain its parameters this time. In this case, simply browsing its preset library and selecting a preset that shortens our loose hi-hats/shakers and introduces a new groove or feel would suffice. After finding the appropriate preset, let's hear how the "Drums Hi" group sounds.

As we can hear, the groove sounds quite different and might now be "too tight." Let's automate the DRY/WElet'sameter to find a middle ground.

You could add a touch of reverb after the Gatekeeper. However, in this case, our drum section sounds good.

Let's hear the full mix. Let's process the "Drums Hi" group.