How to make the kick and snare more prevalent

[FSTZ]

I find mixing around my kick and snare a good approach

making those 2 elements the loudest things and then bring up all the other elements to match

[jsills]

best way to make an element more present in a mix is to simply turn it up, or turn everything else down. compression, eq, saturation etc are all great and excellent tools but-- the huge majority of your mix comes from the faders, not the plugins.

all good answers, love the parallel compression idea, layering, processing, eqing are all very important but i think this one hits the nail on the head. you have to make a concious decision about what is in the forefront of the mix. may seem simple but make the parts of the track you want the most prevalent the loudest and mix everything else around that.


try this. listen to a tune that you think is mixed well and turn volume down so you can barely hear it. you should be able to make out what the loudest parts of the track are and what is most prevalent in the mix. i find this very informative, good training for your ears.

[yamaz]

I personally add some distortion to my kicks and snares. Makes them peak at a lot lower level, but sound as loud, so you have some extra headroom to push them up in the mix. I also use a lot of parallel compression on my drums.

What you do is get all your drum elements, send them all to a bus (using sends not output routing) so you have duplicated the drums. Then on the drums buss you have made, add a compressor, and the idea here is to compress the drums to buggery. really making them pump and distort. I personally then raise the attack, so you hear the pops and shit just coming thru. ok now kill the volume on this channel, solo both drums and slowly raise the compressed channel. Notice at how much energy it gives without adding on too much gain. It kinda fills the gaps in the quieter sections so you get a more fuller, thicker sound.

Can someone elaborate on this more? How do you do this with sends? Why not use routing to new audio track? I use ableton and reason. Thx!

[Depone]

I personally add some distortion to my kicks and snares. Makes them peak at a lot lower level, but sound as loud, so you have some extra headroom to push them up in the mix. I also use a lot of parallel compression on my drums.

What you do is get all your drum elements, send them all to a bus (using sends not output routing) so you have duplicated the drums. Then on the drums buss you have made, add a compressor, and the idea here is to compress the drums to buggery. really making them pump and distort. I personally then raise the attack, so you hear the pops and shit just coming thru. ok now kill the volume on this channel, solo both drums and slowly raise the compressed channel. Notice at how much energy it gives without adding on too much gain. It kinda fills the gaps in the quieter sections so you get a more fuller, thicker sound.

Can someone elaborate on this more? How do you do this with sends? Why not use routing to new audio track? I use ableton and reason. Thx!

I didnt watch this all the way, but this sums it up - (PS: i dont use FL i use logic, and i believe its a bit different in each DAW, but the theory is the same

[press]

best way to make an element more present in a mix is to simply turn it up, or turn everything else down. compression, eq, saturation etc are all great and excellent tools but-- the huge majority of your mix comes from the faders, not the plugins.

this is what i was gonna say aswell. most over looked way to get bigger drumz. i try to resist the urge to compress unless that is truly what it needs.

a drum bus with slight bitcrushing usually makes its way into all my tracks aswell though. a non compression trick to get that "new york" style thwack/thud.

[nowaysj]

I didnt watch this all the way, but this sums it up - (PS: i dont use FL i use logic, and i believe its a bit different in each DAW, but the theory is the same

I would not use this parallel technique inside flstudio. Because flstudio's mixer does not do automatic plugin delay compensation, the compressed version of your drums are going to have phase problems because they will be delayed by the compressor.

Same goes for protools le.

Logic, Cubase, and Ableton can do this. I imagine sonar can as well, but haven't tried. Am told reaper can do this, but I recommend researching this further as reaper has a goofy way of doing apdc, apparently.

To terreket - I was going to give your same advice, volume is almost always the way to make things bigger, but listen to the track, its pretty much only drums and noise, and I don't think the noise is loud enough or in the frequency range to be masking the drums... but maybe it is. If it is, sidechain the noise with your drum buss... but still, crappy samples sounds like the culprit to me.

[Sentinels]

-Good choice of samples
-Tune them
-EQ them
-Excitement?
-Compression
-Transient Modification
-Side Chain the kick against the Sub freqs
-Same with snare and mids (to taste)
- Test them with the limiter

The first bit is the most important in relation to getting the other bits to work.

Hope that helps.