Recording the Drums – Part 5: It’s All In the Mix – Audio Premium

In this week’s Audio Premium content, Bobby Owsinski concludes his series on recording and mixing the drums. This final part is full of techniques, hints and tips from an industry professional.

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Here’s the last part of my series on drum recording, but this time it’s about what might be the most important topics of all – drum balance and that elusive relationship between the bass and drums.

The act of balancing the level of the individual drums is many times taken for granted, but it shouldn’t be. Here’s how important drum balance is – if your kit isn’t properly balanced, you can never be sure if it’s sounding good while you’re recording. You can really have the sounds dialed but it they’re out of proportion to one another, how can you ever know?

A common drum recording flaw that I frequently see is an engineer working harder and harder on the kick drum sound, EQing, compressing, adding multiple mics, yet never taking into account how it relates to the rest of the drum kit. That’s why I think it’s imperative that every engineer do two things before any serious drum miking begins…