?: mixing "heavy" drums..

"Heavy Metal" has become such a broad category with really unusual production challenges these days that it is hard to generalize, but broadly speaking there are two kinds of "metal": Truly "heavy" mid-tempo stuff that is still more or less an extension of blues-based rock (Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Guns n' Roses tradition), and hyper-fast speed or thrash metal with the machine-gun double-kick patterns and blistering, metronomic palm-muted guitar riffs. For purposes of discussion I will call these "blues metal" vs "speed metal."

In almost all metal and heavy rock production, key concerns are bass management and masking. The unique challenges in heavy music production are related to the unusual primacy of the guitar riff, and the tendency for that guitar riff to be a fairly low-frequency, heavily saturated sound.

The simple fact is that metal arrangements are usually the exact opposite of how arrangements are "supposed" to be constructed. You have the guitars pounding out a riff already in the bass range, plus the bass pounding out a variant of the same riff, plus drums that tend to hit in sync with the guitar riff, and you often have zero instrumentation in the middle or upper ranges, other than the guitar solo and possibly the vocal (and the vocal is increasingly fighting to get to the bottom of the freq spectrum as well, these days). There is typically very little breathing space, frequency balance, or dynamic variation to the arrangement and it is way too easy for this kind of material to turn into a weak, mushy, muddy mess of low-end buildup with some papery drums and fizzy guitar overtones on top and a vocal that sounds completely disconnected from the instrumentation.

If you are doing speed metal, the problems are amplified, because very often the notes are played in *such* fast succession that the low-frequency notes do not even have time to develop acoustically before the next note hits. The speed of the instrument parts is such that they are almost creating subsonic waveforms in and of themselves. Combine this with the super-saturated high-gain sounds that are popular in the genre and it is very easy to end up with an almost atonal vortex of steady-state white-noise, regardless of the quality of your mics and such.

Common practice in commercial radio mixing is to bring up the kick, snare, and bass first and then build the rest of the mix around those instruments, which comprise the foundation of the track. But a metal mix is often contructed differently, particularly speed metal. Here, the guitar riff is often performing an overlapping role of impact, rythm, and bass, where the bassy "meat" of the track is not coming from a fat, round bass sound but from the lower-midrange "wub-wub" of the guitar chugs. Indeed, in a fast dropped-D track, the fundamental of the bass may need to be cut out almost completely because it is simply to low to perform any useful role in a conventional mix at such speeds, and the bass becomes a sort of stringy, growly "third guitar" accompaniment track in the upper midrange.

Similarly, the drums and especially the kick/snare pattern that are typically the primary core of the song often take on a different role, where they are supporting and giving impact to the guitar riff, and it is often necessary to use fairly extreme and counter-intuitive eq and dynamics processing to get everything to fit together. Particularly, it is not unusual to have almost all of the lows rolled off of the kick drum so that it is reduced to a very "clicky" beater sound. Additionally the snare is often gated or processed in such a way as to take out most of the explosive "boom." The net result is a solo drum track that sounds very unnatural and possibly quite wimpy, but that is able to fit in with the giant guitar track in a way that is impactful without obscuring.

The central problem is the massive full-spectrum sound of super high-gain guitar. It is necessarily going to mask or be masked by other instruments, so you have to decide what's important. The closer you get to "speed"-style metal, and the lower in frequency the central guitar riff, the more these problems accumulate, but they are considerations in almost all heavy rock mixing, simply because the guitar, in order to sound right, has to take up *such* a huge block of sound.

I know that this doesn't give much specific advice regarding drums, but I guess that's kind of the nature of the beast. This is a uniquely challenging genre to manage, and very often one where a "good drum mix" simply doesn't work. You really have to think through the particular artist and track and be willing to think outside the box, and the comprimises may be severe before you can get all the instruments working together. It's kind of a matter of figuring out how much you can get away with. I might be over-stating some of this stuff as it applies to your particular situation, but if you start out ready and willing to push the limits and break the rules, then it will often go easier.

FWIW, sample-replaced drums are very common in metal recordings and are worth exploring if you are having difficulty getting the right sound.

Cheers.

If it's more midrangey, midtempo stuff, then some distortion and/or gated reverb can help a lot with with making "huge" arena-rock type drum sounds. For a "big beat" sound you can use dynamics and ambience effects to try and "time" the length of the drum hits so that they decay just as the next hit falls.

edit: If your OHs sound good, I would also encourage you to try and build the drum "sound" around the overheads. IOW, you might start with your bass/kick/snare mix just to get the "feel" of the groove working, and then try to build your size and your sound around the room mics rather than the solo kick and snare tracks. By the same token, where you have a lot of drum tracks, remember that you may not actually need to use every single mic in the mix, and that the tom mics for instance might only be used during say "special" drum-roll breakdowns or whatever. In professional studios the close mics are often used primarily as backup "insurance" just in case they are needed. For a whole lot of reasons it is often easier to get better results with fewer mics if you can. A lot depends on the overall quality of the kit and the room and the captured tracks.

Cheers.

You might want to consider doubling the kick and toms with synth drums. Adding a low-pitched sinusoidal-type synthesized drum can give the illusion that the drum is bigger and deeper than it really is. I've had good luck using the good old TTS-1 to reinforce a drum track. It doesn't have to be very loud, just enough to add some bottom.

Another hallmark of a lot of heavy metal (I'm thinking more of classic bands such as Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple) is that there is a lot more room ambiance in the drums than in mainstream pop. Your parts have already been recorded, so moving microphones around isn't an option, but some well-placed reverb and/or short delay could achieve a similar feel.

i was going to make a similar comment regarding stuff like BFD and DFHS. i typically leave the OHs in DFHS but more and more i'm bringing down the ambiance tracks. it all depends though on the mix - in a light mix i like having that filled-out sound with the drums, in a heavy mix it just muds stuff up. but the OP did want less of a clean sound, and that's what room mics will give you.

So I've been on a mixing binge all day (taking the obligatory breaks of course, to keep from frying my ears and brain), and I've been experimenting. A little overhead still sounds good. I put the Ren strip on it, compressed it a bit, gated it a bit, and bring down the lower mids and roll off the highs and lows a bit, and it do provide some nice punch, even when kept quite low. And yeh, it's way easier than the real thing and you can even remove any drums from the overheads and rooms that you don't want (I take the cymbals out since I'm gating them and the cymbals sustain too long and cut off.) So it's a lot easier to tune it in just the way you want.

And, yeh, this is a fairly heavy rock piece, and I'm sure I'd feel differently if I was doing something more open, and actualy the verses are quite open, and I may automate the overheads up a bit during that to give it some more ambience.

ORIGINAL: yep
In all cases, your ears are better arbiters than anyone on any internet forum, including me. If you like the way it sounds, it's good.

Cheers.

100% agreed.

thanks, jack.
i think the motown trick is a good strategy.
remember reading an article about that a few years ago, but didn't have the means to implement it.

dean, thanks for posting that. some good ideas there which i may try out on DFHS. i've found parallel compression the most helpful so far in bringing the kick, snare and toms to the front of the mix without having to turn them way up.