How do YOU route your drums?

[guitarplaya18]

So what different types of drum routing have some of you been doing lately?
As of right now I have all of my drums going to a drum buss and to individual parallel busses which are also routed to the drum buss. then it goes to the master. haha. tried to illustrate below. What are some of the routings you all are currently trying out using?



/Kick---> parallel Kick buss----------\
|Snare---> parallel snare buss---------\
|Hat---> parallel hat buss--------------\ ----> Drum Buss
|Toms---> parallel tom buss------------/
|OH---> parallel OH Buss--------------/
|Room---> parallel room buss--------/
|
\--->Drum Buss

then all to the master

 

[nwright]

I do it really simply. All the shells (kick, snare, toms) go to the drum buss. HH's, ride and OH's go to their own buss (Cymbals bus). Both of those just go to the master. If I have a room mic in mono, I may send it to a stereo buss if I want to process it in stereo. Otherwise I treat it on it's channel.

I use sends to get my FX on the drums I want them on. If I do anything that could be considered "parallel", I tend to run it through the plugins themselves rather than send the track to another buss.

In the recent past, I used a lot more busses for everything, but I've trimmed it down as of late.

 

[Force666]

Pretty much the same as Nate.

all drums to a single bus, oheads to their own bus and I'll usually have a comp and verb fx channel that I'll send individual tracks as needed.

 

[avrinder]

what processing do you guys do (for the overhead bus) ? roll-off from the low-frequencies, and light compression?

curious.

 

[colonel kurtz]

i usually make a stereo group for the OH's, so that i can process both w/o using as many plugins

snare gets its own buss, since it ends up being multiple tracks

toms usually get bussed down all together

i guess that's about it, really...

 

[Force666]

I try and keep it pretty natural. I like to be pretty moderate with the eq (hi-pass 250-300) at most, unless there has been some serious editing then I'll go higher (500-700) and maybe a hi shelf to add a little crispness.

Haven't really felt the need to start sending OH to fx channels yet. But i'm still learning.

 

[jangoux]

Snare mics > Snare Buss > Drum buss
Tom mics > Tom Buss > Drum Buss
Overheads > OH Buss > Drum Buss
All the other crap > Drum Buss

Snare Buss gets Waves SSL, and some clipping, and maybe some saturation
Tom Buss gets clipping + saturation
Overheads gets EQ + Comp
Drum Buss gets Compression (often two staged compressors), saturation and clipping
Everything has different levels of reverb on its sends

 

[NSGUITAR]

Is there a thread explaining what staged compression is? I've looked around and couldn't find a good explanation!

 

[colonel kurtz]

Is there a thread explaining what staged compression is? I've looked around and couldn't find a good explanation!

ugh...it's compression in stages

basically, rather than having one compressor clamp down with a bunch of GR, you get 2-3 in a row doing a little bit at a time

 

[nwright]

what processing do you guys do (for the overhead bus) ? roll-off from the low-frequencies, and light compression?

curious.

I used a combination of EQ/comp, expander and limiter on my current project and I really dig it.

SSL Echannel doing the EQ work (Hi Pass, some notches) very light compression to even out the OH's with the ride and HH, and then using RComp as an expander to "seperate" the cymbals from the kit bleed in the signal and then limiter.

 

[TheWinterSnow]

I keep it really simple. First I take completely unprocessed drums, that are volume balanced, and render it to another track, that track is used as a parallel compression channel. Then I send all the drum tracks to one drum bus.

In terms of compression/eq of OH and Room mics, I never compress OH's, high pass usually around 300-400, room mics are compressed to oblivion with the most intense pumping comp settings possible, (same goes for my parallel comp settings). I don't low pass them mostly because they are naturally passed through the tape saturation on the drum buss, just a small hint of 8-10k on both OH and room.

 

[Dollarosa]

overheads (eq, stereo imager, reverb), toms all have their own buss (eq, compression, reverb, rbass) - which are all routed to the drum buss (eq, saturation, compression). Snare (eq, compression, reverb) and kick (eq, compression, rbass) are routed to drum buss. Each shell has sends with various amounts of parallel comp

 

[Fragle]

no set rules really...
most of the time, i'll have a drum bus, and individual buses for kick, snare, and overheads. overhead bus is for simplicity's sake, so i can treat both channels at once. kick bus includes all the different samples/mics, same goes for the snare bus.

 

[Morgan C]

Every session I do is routed something like this:

I'll only have a 'snare' or 'kick' bus if I'm using multiple samples with different FX on each. There's usually a tom bus there too. 'drumBus' has a bit of compression, and has no cymbals in it, while 'DRUMS' is completely dry and just so I can turn up the entire drum kit as a whole, or mute/solo/etc.

 

[Splat88]

Snare mics > Snare Buss > Drum buss
Tom mics > Tom Buss > Drum Buss
Overheads > OH Buss > Drum Buss
All the other crap > Drum Buss

^This for the win. Then I send a feed from the Drum Buss to a parallel comp group. End of story.