If you are an audio engineer, this page if for you. If you are a drummer, this page is probably not for you. It's very technical and probably boring to the non-engineer types.

Drummers may want to skip on to page two. That page is for drummers!

The other day I was mixing a project that I had tracked over 6 months ago. For just a minute I listened to the drums solo'd. (Note: I never listen to anything solo'd long. Simply put, I couldn't care less what a solo'd instrument sounds like as long as it sounds great in the mix). While listening to these solo'd drums I thought the snare was really thin sounding. Hmm. Out of curiosity, I wanted to hear what my individual tracks sounded like. So, I solo'd the overheads. The snare already seamed better. I hit the phase / polarity button on one of the overheads. Yuck! The sound went out of phase. I quickly pushed the phase / polarity button back to the way I had it. Next, I killed the overheads and solo'd the snare top. Nice and chunky. It was actually one of my better snare drum sounds I can remember recording. Cool, but this means that I have a problem somewhere. So I keep looking. The snare bottom has plenty of crack to it. The toms sound fine and the bleed is about what would be expected. What could the problem be?

Finally, I solo my kick drum. Ouch!! While the kick drum has a nice low end, it doesn't have much attack. Even worse, I'm hearing A LOT of snare drum bleeding into it. In fact, the snare drum, while very thin sounding (due to being picked up by the kick drum's microphone), is not that much lower in level than the kick drum.

Okay, as a mixing guy, I have a little problem here. The bleed of the snare into the kick drum is making my snare sound thin. I mean REALLY thin! My first instinct would be to hit the phase button on the kick. It's possible that snare sound in the kick drum is somehow cancelling the chunk right out of the snare drum. Yuck! That didn't work. Okay, phase is not the problem. It sounds like the problem is simply too much snare drum in the kick drum microphone. This in itself is VERY rare, by the way.

To fix it, I can do a few things. I can simply lower the level of the kick drum's recorded track, but then I'll have no bottom end in the kick. I could try EQ'ing ou the sound of the snare, but we are short on attack from the kick drum anyway and this would only make it worse. I can try a bunch of crazy editing tricks, but the band's budget is not that high. I need a quick solution! If I had sound replacer or Drumagog, I could replace the kick drum, but I never purchased those.

So, I ended up using a Waves C1 gate. This gate does fine must of the time, but I've never figured out how to use a key input with it. That would help a lot in this case. A second best solution would be to allow me to trigger the gate with just the low end. This would open up the kick drum only when a big low is hit. This means that even if the snare drum is pretty loud in the kick mic, the gate will only open up to let the kick drum hits through. Unfortunately, it doesn't have that either. I'm stuck using the gate in the standard manner. Because of this, I ended up using the gate to subtly knock off about 10dB when the signal is below the threshold. When it crossed the line, it reduces nothing. In theory, this should basically take 10dB off the snares while leaving my kick drum in tact. Unfortunately, the problem with the kick drum was severe enough that some snare would barely put it's head through the gate causing a “click” sound. Also, I was having trouble keeping the kick drum sounding natural through the gate because of the timing of the gate opening and closing. Bummer!

So fix the snare clicks in the kick drum track, I had to go through and manually remove any offending snare click in my audio recording software. This took about 10 minutes but did get rid of the click problem. In the end, the weirdness of the kick drum (caused by the gate) wasn't noticeable when the entire mix played. So that problem was basically solved. Now the snare drum was decidedly lower in level. Good! That's what I wanted.

So now I just bring up the level of the snare top microphone until I like the level. Guess what! The chunk is back!!! Mission accomplished!