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I dont typically use vst except for drums.
Scottydog.. your drums sounded epic in your track.. also vst? Also the panning was awesome.

Its a set from Band in a box called heavy rock. Thanks for the comment Claudio. Panning is essential to create space

Yeh i struggle with panning drums. Also. Anytime i double track drums the cymbals sound all out of whack.

    guidothepimmp I use a Kontakt library called Getgood Drums Modern and Massive (it’s produced by a couple of the guys from Periphery)

    So it’s sorta auto panned by default but the basic concept is that you’d either pan audience perspective or drummer perspective.

    For drummer perspective you’d pan the HH to the left (maybe 45), Tom one to maybe 30 left, Tom 2 closer to centre but still left, Floor Tom to 20 or so right and if you have a second floor Tom would be more to the right. Basically try visualize sitting behind a kit and picture where sounds should fit.

    Obviously audience perspective is the same concept but reversed. It makes no sense to me to pan audience perspective cause I think it sounds weird.

    A lot of the drum sound comes from room mics and overheads (as well as parallel compression and parallel verb) and not just the drum shells. These all add the extra ambience that make drums sound huge.

    Depending on how dense a mix is, I might also add an already processed kick or snare sound (e.g. Drumforge Drumshotz if you’re interested). So I’ll take a copy of say the snare, add a hectic gate to it and have that gate trigger a midi note for every transient then those midi notes trigger the sample to play. On a dense mix, this can really help with keeping the snare and/or kick super powerful while still letting everything else shine.

    It’s not only number of tracks that affect how dense a mix is, it’s also all the frequencies that come together. So in my submission, I didn’t use samples in spite of having quad tracked guitars in places but when mixing @RodneyVikens track, I found myself needing to use a snare sample. Nothing wrong either way, just depends per production

      ScottyDogg just a note, for clarity on why I don’t like audience perspective - drums are fairly closely clustered together so if you’re in the audience, you wouldn’t ever hear a high hat 45 degrees to your right, all drum pieces are directly ahead of you.

      From a drummers perspective, much closer to the kit, that’s where you’d hear drum pieces coming from different angles depending on location

      So I think it's pretty dumb to go audience perspective and have it sound like the drum pieces are spread all over the room lol

        We should be able to organize an actual drummer to record this song or at least the final version of it?

        RCVN We can do - I just don't really know anyone with a decent recording set up ready to go but if anyone else does, that would be cool

          Yeh i agree.. recording a live drummer is hectic.
          1. Dead room
          2. Tuned drums
          3. Tight drummer
          4. Drums are micced
          5. Hooked up to daw

          And im sure im missing a few things too ?

            Or an electronic kit. Wont get the sound but you'll have a live performance.

            Yeti You can get the sound - if recording a drummer on an ekit, I'd use midi and with that midi can use the same drum library that I did for my submission. I absolutely would not use the built in ekit sounds

              ScottyDogg i assume you bought the vst package. Thabks for putting me onto it. Im seriously thinking of putting iut the 1000ront to get the drum vsts and kontakt. They sound awesome and have drum samples for rockier kinda tunes.. which i cannot get from my current vst. Just checking how easy it is to use. Im tech challenged.. so just want to make sure i can get it working on cubase

                guidothepimmp There are some free drums VSTs you can play around with (I can't think of any offhand at the moment)

                So Misha Mansoor, one of the founders of GetGood Drums, uses Cubase. I found routing in Kontakt to be quite challenging in Studio One but not sure how tough it is in Cubase. Here's a youtube vid from the GGD channel showing how to do the routing:

                  Thanks. Yeh i currently use powerdrum mt and there is another one i have cant, remember the name.
                  Thanks for the link

                  I have couple of drum vsts will list them this afternoon. One is the MTDrummer and Drummica from Kontact. Cant remember the other and off course, BIAB drumstyles

                    guidothepimmp so rather than sploshing dosh on yet another drum plug in. Im going ro soend some timw learning how to eq he drums. Spent time this weekend with power drummer and with kit se and groove agent. All of them have full on mix consoles with compressors etc. After checking youtube.. i learnt a couple of things that already improved the sound significantly. So much to learn and so little time. Should be fun though. I just need to keep my frustration with slow going in check 1?

                      guidothepimmp Cool cool - a lot of what I read online is professionals saying that buying new shit isn't gonna necessarily achieve what you want right away and often recommend learning stock plugins before looking into spending a fortune on paid ones.

                      So, to help you on the way, for me (and for many others based on my research), the key elements of a drum mix are:

                      • Having a good selection of tracks (you want the shells and HH/Ride in the form of close mics, overheads for the rest of the cymbals and for a snapshot of the shells too, room mics which will give you a lot of power)
                      • EQ (you want separate tracks for the drum mics - don't work in a situation where drums are summed down to one stereo track) - here, you're wanting to remove some frequencies (e.g. somewhere 200-500Hz depending where your kick sounds like a cardboard box - boxy) or accentuate others (e.g. in a metal mix you would boost high end on a kick for the 'clicky' kick sound)
                      • Compression across the mics/drums - be careful not to overdo it but also not underdo it - a lot of power and movement on drum tracks comes from compression
                      • Light compression on a Drum Bus to 'glue' the drums together and make them into one coherent instrument
                      • Send all mics to a parallel compression bus that you will compress the crap out of the drums on (so you'll have the drums processed as above with additional sends to this bus so you can do this processing without ruining your drum mix thus far) - then, just use the volume on the parallel bus to ease in just enough that you have a powerful sounding set of drums (too much gives you an over compressed mess)
                      • Parallel Reverb bus - same concept as parallel compression but you're applying reverb here - this bus can also have a send to the parallel compression bus if you want
                      • Finally, as guitarists, our tendency is to create mixes that very clearly are mixed by guitarists where the guitars are the absolute main instrument and you can hear not enough went into making the drums powerful in a full mix. Try avoid this too ?

                      At the very least, I've given you some pointers on what topics to research further regarding mixing drums

                        a month later

                        Reviving the Thread.

                        We need a starting point.

                        So let's make this easy. What genre?
                        I propose something bluesy or Rock/Hard Rock.

                        4 days later

                        RCVN I vote rock/hard rock

                        Though I'm guessing rock will be more suitable for a greater number of people than hard rock

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