There are lots of things you can do to improve your drum mix before you even touch a fader.
Most people will skip past these steps and get to the “more exciting parts of mixing” and then wonder why their mixes don’t sound professional later.
In this video, I’m going to highlight how taking a few minutes up front to go through some simple steps before you make any fader moves can quickly improve your drum mix and therefore the quality of your overall mix…
How do you feel about this?
Do you prefer taking these steps at the start of a mix or fixing them later?
Leave a comment below and let me know…
professional sounding mix every time...
Yes Stephen I do firmly agree with you. The sooner I can fix problems the easier the over all mix seems to go for me. Keep up the great work. I do enjoy hearing from a fellow mixer that has a passion for helping others. I myself do the same here in my local area. Teaching the young sound people in our local churches how to be efficient in live sound and how to record their services and mix them down for CD’s or streaming. Big thumbs up to you.
Thanks Phil. Keep doing that good work!
There are parts of the editing process that I still forget to do up front. Being the pagan and heathen loner that I am, I lost contact somewhere back in the 60’s with mainstream culture and I’m still playing catch up.
Thanks for your attention to detail, it helps me greatly.
Carry on…….
Thanks Dave!
nice job bro!
Thanks Mr. MixBetterNow 🙂
A very nice tip. Can this do also a good setup noisegate?
A noise gate will work on clean toms but, in this case, I’m trying to eliminate cymbal bleed. A gate will cut off the tom ring unnaturally.
Thank you.
You’re welcome!
Great stuff, Stephen! The sooner in the process you can do anything, the better. Get better recordings instead of “fixing it in the mix,” remove unwanted sounds early, and balance and pan parts, all before EQ, compression or delay.
I thoroughly enjoy your lessons, and manage to take away something from every session.
Thanks Rick!
Thanks Stephen. Very good, as usual. But it makes me so glad that I regularly use Garageband’s drummer. It’s extremely versatile, easy to edit to get exactly what I want, and no bleed!!!
Thanks Tony. Sounds great. Virtual drums will eliminate those bleed issues but I don’t want to eliminate real drummers… that’d be wrong 🙂