programmed drums question...

[pikachu69]

Hey all,

When using programmed drums such as superior, (and choose not to add any extra samples/blends etc) do you find you still have to mix each track (kick, snare etc) or are you just processing the over drum buss and/or do you still split to separate busses for KSTH, cymbals, room and overall buss?
I would assume that since these products are premixed that not much is required but I am interested in different approaches.
Please discuss.

Cheers.

 

[StefTD]

imho, it really depends on the mix, sometimes you just have to process each track or just a few, sometimes
it's enough to process it altogether, for example, using a compressor on the drumbus to glue it all together
a bit more and make it sit in the mix.

P.S.: Nice to see you again Nigel

 

[Sethis]

The superior drummer samples are not premixed unless we're talking about EZdrummer. They're raw so you need to do whatever required to get them sound right. But others are already shaped like the SSD.

 

[Alphanumeric]

All the work in the world like a real kit.

I never use the superior kit on its own except for the cymbals, and I use x-drum a lot, I actually load up the Metal Machine kit as my default kit in the superior GUI, using a couple of those kicks, snare, toms on their own and the China, pull in the odd snare from Foundry or tom augment, most of the other cymbals are brought in from SD.

Surgical eq with the sonalksis stuff in the superior mixer on every kit piece and light compression for kick/snare/toms, and a little in parallel for overheads/room/tom group, lots of transient designer too

This will kill your CPU at this point

then everything routed out into Pro Tools with its own channel bounced as audio, get rid of SD, then to mixing, lots of real compression work for indivudual kick/snare/tom channels, colouring eq for each, and overheads/room bussed together, toms bussed, all sorts of reverb sends, and a drum bus with saturation and very light slow compression.

Toontrack needs a lot of work if you use it exclusively, especially superior. Do yourself a favour and get metal machine and you will have much less work to do for the shells and snare.

 

[pikachu69]

imho, it really depends on the mix, sometimes you just have to process each track or just a few, sometimes
it's enough to process it altogether, for example, using a compressor on the drumbus to glue it all together
a bit more and make it sit in the mix.

P.S.: Nice to see you again Nigel

Thanks for that m8, and yes it is good to be back on here, I have been really busy lately and have missed this site! Must catch up some time.

 

[pikachu69]

All the work in the world like a real kit.

I never use the superior kit on its own except for the cymbals, and I use x-drum a lot, I actually load up the Metal Machine kit as my default kit in the superior GUI, using a couple of those kicks, snare, toms on their own and the China, pull in the odd snare from Foundry or tom augment, most of the other cymbals are brought in from SD.

Surgical eq with the sonalksis stuff in the superior mixer on every kit piece and light compression for kick/snare/toms, and a little in parallel for overheads/room/tom group, lots of transient designer too

This will kill your CPU at this point

then everything routed out into Pro Tools with its own channel bounced as audio, get rid of SD, then to mixing, lots of real compression work for indivudual kick/snare/tom channels, colouring eq for each, and overheads/room bussed together, toms bussed, all sorts of reverb sends, and a drum bus with saturation and very light slow compression.

Toontrack needs a lot of work if you use it exclusively, especially superior. Do yourself a favour and get metal machine and you will have much less work to do for the shells and snare.

Great advice thanks. I am working with tracks given to me by a band so I dont have a choice when it comes to the type of drums I will be using, hense the question. I will take what you said in to account for sure. Thanks.

 

[Marcolobo]

EZDrummer has pre-mixed samples? Everytime i use the standard base kit, i see a lot of information in the whole spectre that's not mixed. If it is coloured, i think is not sculpted anyway.
Going back to the post, in my opinion, every midi track should be treated as an audio file, i mean, if you have the raw tracks of a whole mic'ed drumset, you will treat every track and make them sound great. Same here with a programmed drum, bounce every track and mix from there. Cheers!

 

[Daybreak]

I don't see why your approach should be any different than a real drumkit - Do what you have to do to get to where you want to be.

I would figure programmed would tend to need a bit less compression though, and less editing due to no bleed and stuff. But if it sounds fine to you completely raw, then keep it there. I don't think anyone can tell you that you "have to" mix it. But usually I couldn't see myself mixing drums any other way than all the mics on seperate channels, so I would say route the kick, snare, toms etc to it's own channel, mix them seperately to make them sound as good as you want them to be, then perhaps route them to a drum bus for some coloring/glue.