Really need a hand with my drum sound

[olivertuck]

I was wondering if anyone could please help me out with my drum sound, i live in a shitty little town at the bottom of England and have no one else interested in production who can help me out. I really need someone to tell me what i am doing right and what i am doing wrong in order for me to improve my sound, i'm not going to say 'GIVE ME SCREENSHOTS OF YOUR COMPRESSOR AND EQ SETTINGS' like i have seen many people do on here, i just need people to point me in the right direction and i would be really grateful if someone could help out, i am getting really stressed about this, i also have a feeling that my M-Audio monitors may be fucked...

Anyway here is a basic drum loop which is running through kontakt (Slate Shells and Sturgis emerald cymbals) Im using kick 10 and snare 12a (Shock) and everything is routed out to their own tracks, basic Eq such as 200hz being pulled out of the kick and boosted on the snare, The snare is sent to a reverb bus, All the drums are going to a main drum bus which also has a send to a parallel compression bus (Which doesnt seem to make much difference) I am just not getting the impact that i want from my drums and i keep clipping the input of my master even when using g clip on both the snare and kick channel, and then i have tried g clip and a waves limiter on the main drum bus but i cannot stop the clipping without the drums going stupidly quiet and losing all of their power.

https://soundcloud.com/olivertuck-1/drums-sounding-horrible-imo

Btw i am running cubase 5 and using the stock EQ, i find it easier to use but is there a possibility that it doesn't sound as good?

Thank you anyway

 

[olivertuck]

I want to get a similar kind of sound to this http://www.changostudios.com/wim example.wav Nice and big and powerful and hard hitting

 

[AntonFranzon]

Get the chango samples then, I guess?
Also you've got to train your ears and compare your sound to others.
My experience of eqing the kick is that you've got to cut more around 100-200 than you think, you want to feel the kick in your chest not in your ears!
When you can drag the volume up as hell and you start to smile instead of your keeping your ears, then the drum sound is good!

 

[Gujukal]

Your snare is decent but its pretty hard to fuck up Snare 12A. The kick is the major problem, its way too loud and it lacks any low end t all, feels really thin.Try too bost around 60 Hz and cut a lot of mid freqs, 200-1200 Hz and boost around 4k Hz and it should sound decent..

 

[oroinvictus]

Whoa whoa whoa, hold on, this is a very easy mistake to make that WAY too many around here make. Don't work on the sounds of the drums by themselves. You could have the greatest drum sound on earth but once it's sitting in a proper mix with the rest of the instrumentation it could sound like utter shit. You need to mix in context of the track, with the other instruments present. Don't solo anything while mixing!

 

[olivertuck]

I don't actually mix each instrument on its own soloed, i was just trying to show people what the drums actually sound like, the reason i cut the bass off the kick around 50/60 was because i was then going excite the bass with maxxbass, i now have an updated mix (has some rough guitars in which were done in about a minute) https://soundcloud.com/olivertuck-1/drum-mix-1-ignore-guitars-they

The kick sounds good in my opinion, but i strongly dislike the snare so i started using slates custom snare, 12a sounds incredibly ringy and i dont actually like it that much, slates custom snare is a lot my dry and snappy, thankyou for the help anyway

When people say boosting 4k on the kick do they mean an actually boost, or a shelf that rises across the high end on the EQ

 

[olivertuck]

I deleted the original upload https://soundcloud.com/olivertuck-1/breakdown-test-1-1 This is the new sound i have managed to create after experimenting all day, i have to say i am very happy with the drum sound and overall the mix sounds quite good, if anyone can give me any points to improve on i would be very happy!

 

[tmitchell33]

Ah the chango sound!! Well I would say that the kick is good, boosting 60Hz is not beneficial because a HIFI system will not be able to reproduce this. The tones are reasonable, the problem is there is no room or life in this drum sound. I would start by setting up a stereo drum AUX track. I would then look at adjusting the bleed level in SSD through the overheads to bring the kit back to reality.

I would then set up a second stereo AUX, create a BUS (Send) from every individual drum track at 0dB. Insert a compressor (Or more ideally a channel strip) on this track and get that compressor pumping.. A lot - shape EQ to taste but DO NOT use more than 1 plugin on this track to avoid latency issues. Mix this in with the original to taste.

Set up some reverb AUX tracks for snare and toms.

Balance these techniques so that the drum tracks are a little more 'Dirty' so they sound less artificial and plastic. Listen to a real drum kit in a room, how does it sound?

Chango studio also overdrive all their instruments, most likely with WAVES master tape or something similar. See my 'New here' post for audio example.

Highlight all midi events and randomise the velocity by 3%.

Use a multiband compressor on your drum AUX.

I totally agree with Orionvictus that mixing should take place in context, however I also understand wanting to get the tones and original source sounding good.

 

[olivertuck]

What i did for the drums in the breakdown test (which may be very wrong) but is probably the best drum sound I've ever achieved:

Sent all of the drums out of slate into separate tracks in Cubase, EQd the kick cutting at 200hz, another smaller cut at 120hz, high passed at 40, Compressed with SSLcomp (Full attack/Minimum Release) sent the kick to a bus which had Waves Maxxbass to give it some low end, also had the kicks output and the maxbass track going out to the main drum bus which was Compressed in the same manor as the kick and then limited.

The snare was compressed in the same way as the kick, but was also sent up to a 'Snare Double' bus to thicken up the sound, Snare double was also compressed in the same way and both were sent to the main drum bus, the snare was also EQd with a boost at 200hz (Hoping to fatten it up) cut at 490hz to remove a bit of the ringyness. Also sent the snare to a snare reverb bus which had a long snare verb with the mix on full, i used the fader on this reverb channel to adjust the level of the reverb.

I didnt mix the Cymbals apart from making them a bit brighter with a high shelf and widening them with a stereo imager. The main drum bus had a send to another reverb track which had a drum room impulse loaded, i put the mix to full and blended that drum room signal with the main drum bus, i didn't intend to have fully dry sounding drums...

But anyway it all sounded quite good and im quite happy with the sound i got but there is still room for improvement, feel free to tell me if ive done anything completely wrong or if there's anything i should/shouldn't have done.

I dont want to sound identical to chango studios mixes, i just liked the way that in that demo, the kick and snare sounded absolutely massive and thats what im aiming for, a big thick drum sound, im pretty sure i still need to fatten up my snare in some way and get it sounding right.

Thankyou