Welp... back at it. I took your suggestion, scook and tossed the Sonitus EQ onto the two stereo drum tracks I had created. It was a bit of a bear but eventually I got the low kick and tom track doing what it was supposed to and the higher end snare/cymbals track airier. I could not for the life of me get any kind of decent compression going though (everything I did introduced artifacts and created a "whoomph whoomph" noise at certain points) so I let that be. I went over to the bus I have both tracks going to and THEN tweak the PC eq. I just brought up the lows and highs with the shelf thingy and slightly brought up a wide swath of the mid range to draw out the toms a little better. That worked quite well (to my ears anyway). Again though I tried the PC compressor and a bunch of the other compressors but the tracks were having none of it. Oh well. So I decided to see what would happen when I tube module. Not so good. Then I tried the Softube Saturation... BRILLIANCE! Sounded great with it set to Low at about 10 o'clock. After that I wanted to try some reverb but I've always sucked at applying reverb and frankly don't like much of it on my stuff anyway but I felt the drums needed a bit of distance. I thought this was gonna be a nightmare. Nope. Learned how to use Perfect Space from the X1 Power book, dropped in one of the Blues Club IRs, fiddle for all of 5 seconds with the knobs and we had a winner. Very nice. This compressor business is weirding me out though but I guess it's just the tracks. I think they are too busy and because they were already processed in BFD they're messing with the compressors. Hopefully this doesn't cause a problem when I go to toss some compression on the entire mix. Anyway... there ya go. Semi decent drum sound accomplished. Yay!

You know you will get much better results from breaking out the drums (at least this project should reinforce that knowledge).
You might save this project away and use it for a drum replacement exercise at some later date.

Yeah, this really wasn't meant to turn into anything this epic but I just kept adding to it. I think I may have had the output level on BFD too high as well. It wasn't clipping but I didn't account for gain staging/fx stuff. I think it'll definitely need some compression but if the drums don't want to cooperate I'll just send all the other busses to a compression bus and see how that works. Cheers, dude. Now I'm gonna see what I can do with the bass. This'll be more in my realm of knowledge.

I was given a stereo drum track recently for a song to mix. Decided to make the best of it and see how far I could take it. Kick was boomy so cloned the track and put a multiband on each (any will work - I used LP-64 Multiband). Then set a good crossover point for the thump of your kick, maybe around 150 ish. Now solo band 1 on the first track and mute band 1 on the second track. Now you have complete control. Not sure if this was what you were already doing as you didn't say (or I missed it), but just incase, there it is!

Then a gate on the kick was necessary to tighten it up on this sample. I also automated the release time to get more resonance in the verse, and a tighter sound on the chorus. Smashed it through the Tube Leveller too for a bit of smack then used the Antress Modern Pultec emulator eq to dial in some tighter low end kick. I don't know what that thing is doing but there is something in the low end that it does that I can't get any other compressor to do. I'm sure the real thing or decent UAD plugs are even better, but for FREE, the Antress is GREAT and I can't get that sound with anything else. I'd almost consider cutting the lows with a normal eq then boosting them back up again with the Pultec emulator just to get the sound it's that good!

Snare crack I could bring out a bit with the Transient Shaper. But be careful as too much will eat into the middle of your cymbals. To counteract that, but still add the punch, you might like to add a second parallel compressed track with NO shaper on it to fill in the breaks with more cymbal so that the transient shaper doesn't eat them all away. Combine to taste. You may get more snap this way, with a thicker sound 'inside' the drums. I might just try this myself on the track. Also a bit of ringing on the snare I didn't like, so a sweep with a high Q eq found it around 500 and then I cut that out to tighten the snare a bit more.


Anyway, that was my experience with doing my first mix of just a simple stereo drum track. Maybe there will be some ideas for you there, maybe not. But I hope you get something from it, Beep!


If you want to give that Antress Modern Pultec emulator (AKA Modern Black Dragon - half way down the page) a go - http://antress.blogspot.com.au/

Thanks for that, Mike. I've got a lot of uses for that technique and have had to do a similar process before but not on a stereo track... well kind. I had to mix a live gig of my old band. There were two overheads, kick, snare. It was captured by pros on good gear but at the start of the best track the snare mic screwed up so it was cut off for the first minute of the tune. This was unacceptable because there some big dramatic snare hits and fills during the section. So I went into the overheads and did my best to slice around the snare hits and EQ out as much of the other mayhem going on (cymbals, kick, toms, crowd noise). It was pretty weak at first but I managed to pull up something meaty enough to use. I blended into the mix and although it wasn't perfect I had a snare again. The casual listener wouldn't have noticed at all. I was pretty impressed with that so I set my sights on the toms (lots of tom work in that band). They as well were super weak because they hadn't been close mic'd. Managed to pull them out and fatten them up and all was well. That was all completely guesswork on my part. The engineer guys said it was good enough to master. Sadly the project lost interest (it was supposed to be for a comp) and the tune never got used. I still have all those files and intend to give it another go with all my fancy new crud. Anyway... that was a long boring story but these drum tracks were pretty much almost there because I tossed it together from grooves in BFD and a mixer preset. I just wanted to fatten things up and get some air in the high and maybe smooth it out a bit. What I've done has accomplished the first part of that goal but the smoothing just doesn't want to happen it seems. It's no biggie and I think it sounds good enough for a test track. I just wanted to play with the fancy compressors... but it looks like I'm gonna get a chance to do just that on my bass tracks. I'm just reviewing the bass thread that popped up about a week ago. Lots of gold in there... http://forum.cakewalk.com..aspx?&m=2658768&mpage=1 Thanks again, Mike. Cheers.

Beepster, I don't have BFD Eco, so I can't speak from first hand knowledge.

BUT - if it's anything like it's big brother, I always have to attenuate the signals leaving BFD2 via the the mixer page by about 10dB otherwise they are too damned loud coming into Sonar.

And yes, as others have pointed out, you're going to get infinitely more flexibility if/when you break each kit piece out onto separate channels from BFD and then onto separate tracks in Sonar.

Thanks, Jonesey. Good to know I'm not going crazy (or more so). I think I'm gonna have to accept the fact this isn't gonna turn out as good as I'd like without completely redoing the drums. I've been trying to figure out how to notch out a spot for the bass without killing the drum sound but it'll just have to be a little buried. I think I'm just gonna tweak the bass/guitars today and leave it at that so I can move on. Learned a lot doing this though. :-)

Beep, I take it you still have the MIDI for your drum track? So it wouldn't be a major thing to split them now? Is it just a time thing?

Hi, synkro. Hope the leg is healing up. Actually I don't have the MIDI for it. That's the problem. For some reason BFD Eco only gave me the option to export a stereo WAV. I was hoping it would export/save a MIDI file. What's worse is it also wouldn't let me save the the BFD project as a work in progress. If I wanted to close it I either had to export the WAV or lose my work. It's really crappy. I may have been missing something but I spent a good long time looking at all the options and the manual and couldn't find anything. I just wanted to try it as a standalone and make a quick demo for my BFD thread but I ended up getting distracted by some real world stuff and the song kind of turned into something quite a bit more intricate than I planned. It's fine though. I'll never use it as a standalone like that again and the song is coming together rather nicely but it just won't be quite as slick as I would normally shoot for. As I said I think the only real problem is gonna be getting the bass to stand out the way I want but it's a guitar thick metal tune anyway so it's not a huge deal. I should have it posted somewhere on the forum soon. Cheers!

Ah, with you now. Well... you don't know till you try, and it's all part of the learning process. As others have suggested, you could, when you have time in the future, use the stereo audio file in a drum replacement exercise.

As for the leg, I've had my knee operation and it's "healing." Bloody painful still mind, and I'm dosed up to the gills with opiates, which sounds fun, but it ain't, not with all the side effects that comes with it lol

Started physio today, just as I was getting used to having a bit of a rest...

Thanks for asking :)