dididub wrote:@nowasj
Holy cow. I gotta stop posting after I've taken ambien.
So listen, only god could sort through that, but at the end of that, eq section, I'm talking about working up the frequency spectrum, and just checking to make sure everything is okay. When eq'ing a lot of elements together, like a buss or a mix, you've gotta kind of do this forest/trees/forest/trees kind of thing where you zoom in, zoom out, zoom in, etc. Listen to the whole thing, just listen for annoying frequencies, listen for the overall balance (can listen against pro/commercial tracks here), and then start working up the spectrum. Check you subs, like 0-80. Then check your bass, 80-200. Then check your vast mud field 200-up to around 800 or 1000. Then 1k up to like 3k. 3 to 5k. 5k to 12k and after that, fugget about it, I can't hear a thing
but maybe you can. These are totally just loose guidelines that I've found to be kind of natural ranges. So I go through, listen to the whole mix, zoom into the sub range, zoom back out listen to whole mix, zoom into bass range, zoom out listen to whole mix, zoom into the mids, etc. Here, you're just zooming your focus, or your mental attention into that range. This is maybe a little more advanced, and is not just about drum buss processing, but whateves.
Okay, but the general idea for drum buss processing is to treat the drums as one thing. To do things that can't be done to individual sounds or channels. So whatever you can work into that, go for it. But don't feel like you need to be doing anything to the drum buss! I know that is no help, but that is how it is. There are a lot of tools available to you, but you got to know when to not use them, when to use them, and if then, how much.
And finally a note about parallel processing. Feel free to try some of these techniques in parallel. Meaning that you maybe take the whole drum buss output off of the premaster, rename the former drum buss to pre drum buss, send it to a drum buss channel, and drum buss parallel channel, then send drum buss parallel channel to drum buss channel. Now on that parallel drum buss channel you can do all the crazy shit you want to do. Like just slamming it with a comp or limiter, or some type of crusty saturation, or maybe a reverb or whatever. And just control how much that parallel drum buss feeds into the new actual drum buss. Just blend it in to taste. You can be extremely aggressive with your parallel processing and then quite subtle with how much you blend back in.
BLAH!
