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Old 06-03-2012, 08:34 PM   #2177
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Figas View Post
...For now, I wanted to know if you are already able to share some ideas on drum compression, since it's a topic that has been stared at least two times i can recall, but never actually quite discussed...

My problem is when trying to achieve a ... powerfull drum sound. Not godly like, just not as thin as I'm achieving right now. ...
For big, explosive, powerful drum compression, try using distortion effects, especially in parallel. Plug a drum track into a guitar distortion pedal or amp sim and play it back with the whole mix going and you'll be amazed how heavily you can distort before the drums sound like they are "distorted" or "lo-fi". They just seem to get huger and sizzlier and more explosive. Play around with it and go nuts, try reverbs, have fun.

This is a big part of why "analog" drums sound so awesome: tape gets that "explosive" saturation when you hit it hard in ways that digital does not. Try tape sims or "saturation" effects.

Once you've spent some time introducing your drum tracks to distortion/saturation effects, create a parallel "clean" track of the un-processed drums. Now turn down the "distorted" track until it is the same AVERAGE signal strength as the "clean" drum track (this will probably be somehting like a 20dB reduction-- this kind of level-matching was dealt with in the early parts of this thread).

Now turn up the volume on your speakers to get your clean drums sounding like a real drum kit, and A-B. Your "explosive", "massive" distorted drum track is now apt to sound flat and trashy and "fake" compared to the ear-spanking, whole-body dynamics and punch of real drums.

This is the problem before us: Take a lifelike recording of a real drumkit and turn it down to living-room TV-watching volume levels, and it sounds tiny, papery, and small. Compress and saturate it until it sounds big, powerful, and explosive at moderate volume. So far, so good. Now play it back at through a high-quality system at something like concert or movie-theater volume, and it sounds flat, ugly, distorted, and cheap precisely where it should sound best.

This is 99% of the art of audio engineering in a nutshell: getting stuff to sound more or less the same whether it is played back loud or quiet, on expensive or cheap equipment, on headphones, a club PA, a car stereo, TV speakers, a boombox, whatever.

One of the cool things about tape was how well it handled "hot" signal. You could find a sweet spot where the very top peaks hit a kind of explosive/airy saturation, and where stuff in-between had a sort of natural, variable-knee compression, and where the quietest stuff faded off into warm, modulated background hiss, just subliminal hints of sound.

Digital is much more accurate and much less forgiving. You can pretty much do anything with digital that you can do with tape, and usually better, but it takes more work, sort of.

Really great drum sounds, in terms of stuff that sounds great on all playback systems at all volumes, almost always requires multiple stages of dynamics on different kit-pieces.

Drum kits are far and away the most difficult instrument to record well, and are really a topic for a thread unto themselves. But the above experiment with distortion and clean sounds should give you a pretty good sense of the extremes of what you can achieve, and the earlier concepts of dynamics, frequency, etc apply to the rest of it.
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