HOW TO MIX ROCK / METAL DRUMS (a guide for dummies) PART 3/4

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Once we have analyzed how to treat the room, cymbals and toms, it's time to talk about the kick.

Let's start by saying that there are different ways to work a kick effectively, according on if we want to preserve the acoustic sound or, at least, part of it:

Assuming that we have tracked a good sound, we must first do a high pass filter, cutting everything below about 35hz, then we can scoop an area that may vary from 150hz to 400hz: this is where the "mud" lies, but beware because if we take out too much energy from here, the kick will lose its body, especially on the cheapest speakers.
Once we have tamed the frequences where most of the energy lies, we can boost if we need some more "thump"  in the 50hz-80hz area, and some high end between 2'000hz and 10'000hz, depending on the type of coloring that we want to give to our kick.
On the compression side we can compress at a ratio around 8:1, with a fast attack and a release speed that should be set according to the song's speed.
Just remember that a too hard compression can ruin the sound's transient, so if we need to apply so much compression that the sound becomes dull, it's better to stack 2 compressors with lower settings, and/or try to reconstruct the lost transient with a transient shaper.

If we have a sub kick microphone too, we can consider our kick sound splitted in 2 tracks,  one for the lower frequences, one (with a high pass filter at around 500hz) for the higher ones: this way we can compress the low end more and the higher end less (thus preserving the transient), and maybe do some sidechain compression with the bass, so that the bass sound is slighly compressed when the sub kick track kicks in, which may be crucial when dealing with death metal speeds, to preserve clarity and separation.

Even if we are tracking our drums just with one microphone, we can always double the track and do the same as if we had 2 microphones: the result will be less complete, but always more flexible than dealing with one single track.

Finally, we can obviously use a sample: usually pre-processed samples tends to be oriented to the high frequences, so when we blend them with our acoustic sound, it's often a good idea to treat the acoustic track as the "sub kick one", and use it to emphasize the lower region.


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