Drum Processing - Drum Sends
So youāve spent hours and hours carefully processing and developing some drum hits. Youāve processed all your individual hits and have a nice beat rolling but it doesnāt sound quite there yet; what to do...?
Here are some drum group send techniques Iāve developed over the last few years that can squeeze a bit more vibe from your drums.
First, Iāll assume you have your drums set up similar to this picture below. I have my kicks, snares and hats all bussed to their own individual groups like so. From here, these submixes go to a whole drum group channel...
...as seen in this picture, the group track entitledĀ ādrumsā. This is where all the drums meet. On here, you can do more processing/compressing/distorting and itās from this bus that we will be making some sends.
The first idea we will play with is to make a drum group-specific reverb, as seen here. The idea is to make a send with an EQ first in the chain and then the reverb. Itās not visible here, but Iāve sent about -20db or so of volume from the drum group to this reverb send. From here, itās a good idea to pre-EQ out lots of the low end of all the drums on the send channel and maybe some of your snare fundamental as you donāt want duplicates of these floating around the mix.
The idea of this send is to give the drums some space and ambience so they donāt sound like samples sitting in an empty project. As this is drum and bass, quite short reverb times are good, anywhere from 10ms to 50ms usually works, depending on the tune. Fiddle with the character controls and EQ settings of your reverb as well as the amount of signal being sent to the send to make the reverb fit in with the drum sound and the rest of the track. Listen to how it sounds with the rest of the track playing as well as solo.
Another send I often like to make for my drums is a stereo widening FX send, as seen below. The set up here is identical to the previous send except here, Iāve sent full volume from the drum group to this send and used this Sound Delay plugin on the send (after similar pre-EQing as on the previous reverb send to get rid of low frequencies and snare fundamentals) to slightly delay the left and right channels, creating a wide stereo duplication of the drum group signal. I send the entire drum group signal here and then use the send channel volume to mix it in with the rest of the drums. Be careful here with having too much high end or creating anything that will screw up your dry drum transients (EQing out lots of things is good for this). This will add some subtle width and size to your now reverbād drums.
Finally, a more specific drum send, but this time only for the snare. Below is a picture of another send that Iāve sent only my snare submix group to, not the full drum group.
This channel is set up with a pre-EQ to only let in high frequencies, a reverb and another Sound Delay plugin. The idea here is to create a wide and sharp high end attack for the snare only. A very short reverb time and a small pre delay mimics a nice white noise tail for the snare. Listen carefully and tweak carefully to assure your artificial snare tail mixes in properly with the snare and the rest of the drums.
These are just a few ideas. Experiment and see what sounds good. I believe these techniques and others are what can separate average drums from really nice sounding drums and can add that extra few % of vibe to your track.
