I need drum production tips

Some General Kick Drum Mixing tips. These are general. You need to Use your ears for the sound

Some General EQ Tips:

• Less Boominess - Cut around 80Hz
• More Boominess - Boost around 80Hz
• More Thud - Boost around 1kHz
• More Click -Boost around 12kHz
• More Attack - Boost 5kHz
• Less Wallop - cut around 220Hz
• More Wallop - Boost around 220Hz

Kick Drum For Rock:

• Use a double headed kick drum
• If the kick is too boomy, try cutting 2 to 6dB at 80Hz and then another cut  with 5 to 12dB at 200Hz. Use your ears to determine the amount of Db to cut. After these cuts are made, you should not hear any boominess anymore.In fact you should be hearing allot more of the head and way less resonance.
• To addd more "flap" boost between 2 to 10dB at 500Hz.
• You can also boost a bit at 12kHz with a peak or better yet a shelving filter.

A Long Tone kick Drum:

• This is for simulating the sound form the Roland TR-808 Long Kick. I strongly suggest you turn your monitors down a bit for these tweaks.
• Boost between 8 to 10dB at 80Hz
• Cut between 8 to 10 dB at 300Hz
• Cut between 8 to 10dB at 1kHz
• Boost at 12kHz until it sounds good to your ears.
• Add a hall reverb with medium pre-delay and a long decay for sustain. Perfect space IR reverb has a kick and snare preset. I suggest trying one of the kick presets and tweaking it to taste. If you don't have Perfect Space, any reverb that contains hall sounds is good.

Funky Funk Kick Drum:

• Cut between 5 to 7dB at 80Hz to get rid of the boomines. The more boominess you have, the more dB you should cut at 80Hz and the less boominess you have, the less dB you should cut at 80Hz.
• Boost between 5 to 7dB at 350Hz
• Boost between 3 to 6dB at 3kHz
• Boost a bit at 12kHz using a peak filter or shelving filter. The dB boosted is just to add a bit of presence to it, so not too much boosting.
• You are going to need to compress with a medium attack, slow release, a threshold set to taste and the ratio set to around 4:1

Here are some snare Drum tips:

EQ'ing The Snare Drum: (Note: These are just suggestions and guidelines, as nothing is written in stone. You must use your ears, as each song will need different EQ settings)

• Try using a high-pass filter set at 120Hz and under. 120Hz is a great starting point and then just slide the filter downward for desired cut. 
• Boost between 150 - 300Hz. This will fatten the snare drum up for you.
• Try cutting around 400 - 900Hz to eliminate some boxiness low end
• Boost between 5 - 7kHz for a crispness
• A boost between 9 - 15kHz will add some nice brightness to the snare. Just make sure it doesn't interfere with the vocals in that range.

Source: Snare Drum Tips    Kick Drum Tips

CJ

Yeah, thanks for that,CJay!

All them numbers cjaysmusic has just given will mean nothing as it depends on your audio files.
You can record a snare using three different mics and three different techniques and you will need to process each one different as each audio track will be different.
Their are no magic numbers  or presets that you can dial in and you have a great snare in a mix. That is why only a handful of great mix engineers exist in the world and command 5K in any money a song for their skills. The $100 -200 dollar mix engineers are two a penny out there.
You can get a fairly good sounding recording but its like a great masterpiece  painted by a master very few if an can even copy it.
You may have that gift which needs to be unleashed  or you could mix forever and still be no good at it. If you have  a recording and 10 engineers in the same room it would be very hard to get 100% agreement even on a great mix.

You need to use your ears as is also mentioned.

One thing that comes to mind if your looking for an 80's snare sound is a long gated reverb. Also a sample of a snare with a loose batter head would probably be a good starting point.

Yea, some  people like Garvolt didn't comprehend the meaning of this. Ill quote it in same size of my original post
"Some General Kick Drum Mixing tips. These are general. You need to Use your ears for the sound"

Garvolt also missed the point of the person using samples from BFD. I dont even think Garvolt read the question the poster asked. Poor Garv . I can cal you Garv for short  LOL, as your post fell short of the persons question
Cj

CJay's general starting points there are great; I've had a notebook with a bunch of similar notes for different instrument types on my desk for years, and it's a really useful resource. Not a set of rules as people have said, but a good rough guide.

I'm also a big BFD2 user, so in specific response to this:

If anyone is familiar with BFD2, I'd love a specific suggestion for kick and snare (I have the Andy Johns and Joe Barresi expansion packs) and any tips on getting the above. Do I have to start with a certain mixer preset?

Expansion packs and presets are okay as far as they go, but they're not really the solution to your problems.
What BFD2 is best at being is a fantastic resource of superbly well recorded, largely un-produced drum sounds, wrapped up in a very intelligenrt playback engine.

Rather than trying to find the sound you're after amongst the mix pre-sets, once you've got your drum track going, I think you'd be better off going back to first principles. I always switch all the preset effects and so on off in the BFD mixer view and start from a clean slate.

This is where CJay's crib sheet is actually exactly what you need to be looking at. Basically, once you learn about mixing drums in a general sense, then BFD becomes a great tool. Because as I say, it's just a massive set of extremely well-recorded drums from half a dozen different kits. Get your drum mixing principles down in a general sense, and you'll be able to get pretty much any sound you could want out of it.

What use are ears if they are not trained to understand what the'yre hearing.Then when you have learned what you're hearing you need to learn how to sculpt that sound out of other listening experiences.
Even great artisits learned the rudimentry elements of there art form then went on to give new meaning through their expression.

John T


Yeah, indeed. The amount of repetition of the "use your ears" line of this and other audio forums is kind of redundant and grating. I'm pretty sure I've never once seen someone say "Oh wow, great advice. I've been using my ass by mistake".

You, sir, owe me a keyboard! Coffee everywhere, LOL!

Untrained ears on cheap monitors in an acoustic nightmare of a room...that's the ticket! (not saying this is what the original poster is doing, just a general comment)

Still, you have to start somewhere...the little wombat is right though.

I've found that multiple layers of parallel compression really helps BFD to sound more "right".  I usually create one bus with sends from kick+snare+rooms.  Then I do another with a send from the full kit.  Once you've got the kick and snare punching right, then you'll want to dial the cymbals back and start fine tuning the kit.

Even more important than that is getting the velocities of the cymbals right.  I despise the sound of the kick that comes through the overheads so I always shut that off. 

John T


Yeah, indeed. The amount of repetition of the "use your ears" line of this and other audio forums is kind of redundant and grating. I'm pretty sure I've never once seen someone say "Oh wow, great advice. I've been using my ass by mistake".

I think using your ass is only good on a mono mix!

I'm just waiting for BFD to be released in 64 bit.

This is the one thing that's holding me back with upgrading my system.

Thanks for that Steve.

My main reason for wanting to go 64 bit is purely to have the ability to run multiple instances of EWQLSO for my orchestral projects.

Currently, I'm pieceing together a rock album, so there's no immediate rush.

I've managed to squeeze out on a couple of songs, 75+ audio tracks, with 100+ plugs, extensive automation, and loads of V-V clips, and this will run at about 50% cpu usage, so it's only for th eorchestral stuff that I'm oging to need 64 bit.

Besides, the wife would have a head fit!!!!!!