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What do you all prefer to do when it comes to your drums? I wasoriginally told to layer my kicks, snares etc. But I found that putting a limiter and bass compressor creates the same quality. Your opinions?

i never use limiters

but i layer to create different sounding kicks and snares, not just about making them loud you know

Drake6 wrote:What do you all prefer to do when it comes to your drums? I wasoriginally told to layer my kicks, snares etc. But I found that putting a limiter and bass compressor creates the same quality. Your opinions?

Your misunderstanding the end result: compressing/limiting might make it just as loud, but thats not the point of the process--its to create a new sound with the feel/tone you're looking for.

Layering a few different drums with filtering/eq to get different elements to create a whole new sounding drum sound, ie: a snap of one snare, the tail of another, and the body of a third.

Or layering the same drum sound to increase volume, or using Parallel Compression/'New York' Compression to add some punch to the drums.

I sometimes layer real kicks with digital kicks. With snares I layer a whole bunch of snares, claps, white noise, sometimes I take snares from my old tunes and layer them with more snares. Then I compress all the snares to fuck with a single compressor with a long attack.

Ok. so pretty much a little bit of both.

Kicks - Usually unlayered but compressed
Snares - Always layered, usually with 3 or four layers + compression
Hats - Usually unlayered, not always compressed, but usually verbed

I guess it all depends on the setting & sound sought after. For hard hitting shit, then compression is a must. But for simple dynamics control, sometimes eqing and or turning things down a bit is sufficient!

both

Nice! Thanks everybody. I think I got it now.

Ketamine wrote:

Drake6 wrote:What do you all prefer to do when it comes to your drums? I wasoriginally told to layer my kicks, snares etc. But I found that putting a limiter and bass compressor creates the same quality. Your opinions?

Your misunderstanding the end result: compressing/limiting might make it just as loud, but thats not the point of the process--its to create a new sound with the feel/tone you're looking for.

this can also be done with compression...i think 'loudness' is only a small part of compression..

try it all. sometimes just a single snare works, sometimes w/ 20db of compression, sometimes w/ a layered snare, sometimes all, sometimes just a rim click.

but train your ears for the details... lots of ways to make things louder and thus immediately sounding 'better,' but the end results are very different.