Recording and mixing drums for popular music productions is tricky for many different reasons. If you're an indie artist with no access to a decent room and a multi-channel audio interface with decent microphones attached to it, it's not going to be easy... but even if you do have all that, recording a drum-set requires a lot of experience and is just not what most indie artists need to spend their time on.
It took my purist rocker mind some time to admit, but this is actually a very good solution...
The common solution nowadays is virtual sampled drums, hopefully controlled by a physical electronic drum-set played by a real drummer (not in my case unfortunately). It took my purist rocker mind some time to admit, but this is actually a very good solution for many artists who can't afford the real thing and here is why:
Recording is irrelevant, you don't need extra mics, no extra channels and no acoustic drum-set to store where you once had your bed
The drums recording quality is way better than you will ever be able to get in most home studios
You can have more than one drum-set for different situations, just like large studios do
mixing virtual drums can be done in more than one way...
So, you're sold! And now all you have to do is record your midi drum parts, mix your song and you're done. But mixing virtual drums instruments can be done in more than one way and that's what I want to focus on here.
The most straightforward method of mixing virtual drums is to load the instrument, make adjustments in the instrument's interface (or leave it the way it was set by the patch designer) and use a single stereo output from the virtual instrument in your DAW mixer to mix the drums with the rest of your tracks. While that is simple and will do the trick in many situations, it is not as flexible (and fun) as it would be if you had dedicated channels for all your kit elements in your DAW mixer!
Here are the top reasons I use dedicated channels for my virtual drums:
I like to use my favorite compressors and EQs on individual drum channels (usually only on Kicks, Snares and overheads)
I sometimes want to have control over how much of each drum I send to the session reverb aux
Monitoring individual channel levels in the DAW mixer is handy in early mix stages
Multi-Channel Virtual Drums Mixing
Most virtual instruments players support multiple outputs. I primarily use Native Instrument #Kontakt Player as my virtual instruments platform, so I will explain how I do that in Kontakt Player, but everything I explain here applies to any instrument that supports multiple outputs!
Create Your Outputs
First, find out how to change the number of outputs your virtual instrument player exposes to your DAW. Set the required number of output tracks and their kind (stereo/mono) based on the channels your drums plugin has and the number of channels you want to expose to your DAW. In many cases you want to consider setting up a very simple sub-mix for several drum channels in the instrument mixer and send that mix to a single output channel. This can spare you some tracks and simplify your DAW mixer layout. This is what I do for toms and overheads, as well as some percussion instrument channels.
Once you have outputs set up, you should be able to see the instrument channels in your DAW mixer.
Route Your Drum Channels
It's time to route the instrument plugin channels to the output channels you have just created. If your drums plugin interface has a mixer, select one of the channels and look for a way to select its output. In NI Abbey Road Drummer series, that option is on the right-hand side of the channel "settings" tab. Route all your channels the way you want to and make sure your DAW receives audio from all the channels. Once that's done, I would stop and create a preset for the plugin, for easy recall later on.
If you want to really mix it yourself, reset the instrument plugin mixer, so that the audio your DAW receives is unprocessed.
Setup Your Drums Mix
Now we are in DAW land! This is the time to start routing your individual drum channels in your DAW mixer as if they were audio channels. My typical setup would look something like this:
Kick, Snare, Hit-Hat, Toms routed to a bus labelled "> Drums"
Overheads channels routed to a bus labelled "> Overheads"
Room mics, "> Drums" bus and "> Overheads" bus routed to a bus labelled "> Kit"
In addition to your sub-mixes, you may setup reverb sends the way you want to.
It's a good idea to have project templates with preset channel names and color codes...
This is pretty much it. Now you're free to mix your drums as if they were recorded by a pro, use whatever mixing techniques you want to, with whatever plugins and tools you wish to.
Happy mixing!
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