Mastering question: dealing with large transients

[pikachu69]

I have been given a track to master (no stems, just stereo mixdown) and the drums are too loud overall and the transients are sticking up well above the body of music.
How would you deal with this situation?
Expander?
Compressor?
Transient designer?
m/s processing?

If I clip or limit to get the required volume I introduce too much distortion or loose the puch of the drums.

Cheers.

 

[BLUElightCory]

There isn't much you can do about the drums being too loud overall. Some compression with a fast attack will tame the transients, but be wary of changing the mix too much (assuming the band has already approved it). If the band also thinks the drums are too forward, they need to get stems or an adjusted mix from the mixing engineer.

 

[Harley Barley]

try using multiple limiters/clippers instead of just one, and bring each one down until its limit of distorting then put another one on. sometimes that works.. or use M/S and do crush just the MID where i'm assuming the drums are haha. or try a transient designer. there are a million things to do the only way to know if they'll work is to try them.

 

[pikachu69]

Thanks for the replies so far guys.
I have had a go at it with some success with a combo of tape saturation, transient designer and m/s processing. This enabled me to not have to clip or limit hard at all so I avoided any distortion. (only one limiter used)
Any more suggestions will be welcomed as I may have another go at it today.
Cheers.

 

[Sloan]

I've had good results with gclip on drums.i would do gclip > soft clipper or saturation > comp > limit

 

[mva801]

Did you try using the expander at all? With the right setting that could help bring everything else up but the transients. But the key is to take small steps with many things as oppposed to one large step.

 

[tempe]

Try a limiter at the very start of your chain just catching the very loudest of peaks, that and a little saturation can go a long way.