Drum Production

EQ

Bass Drum

For a modern sound, boost slightly in the 6kHz to 12kHz region, to accentuate the transient click as the beater hits the skin. The thump of the beat can be brought out by boosting between 2kHz and 3kHz. To give a deep, powerful 'thud' to the sound, boost between 75Hz and 100Hz. If the sound has a tendency to boom or resonate, try cutting between 200Hz and 400Hz.

Snare Drum

To accentuate the stick impact and rim shots, boost at about 5kHz. The rattle of the snares lies mostly between 5kHz and 10kHz. The 'bang' of the drum is in the region of 1-3kHz. The body resonance of the drum can be found at 100-250Hz.

Toms

The tom-tom sound can be made more dynamic by boosting at around 6-8kHz for the stick impact and 3kHz for the 'thwack'. The body of the sound generally lies between 100Hz and 500Hz depending on the size of the drum. Depending on context, you may wish to boost the lower registers to add power and coloration, or cut these frequencies to emphasise the impact rather than the body and decay of the sound.

Hi-Hat

The major components of the hi-hat sound are the ring, from 7-10kHz, the stick noise, at about 5kHz, and a clang in the region of 500Hz to 1kHz.

General Drum Kit EQ

• Boosting in the region between 8kHz and 10kHz will make the cymbals more prominent and sparkling.
• Boost applied in the 5-8kHz area will bring out the stick noise on both snare and hi-hat.
• The 'bang' of the bass and snare drums and the toms can be adjusted by boosting or cutting at around 1kHz to 3kHz.
• The body resonance of the drums can be augmented or reduced by EQing from around 100Hz up to 300Hz.
• Be careful in boosting frequencies below 500Hz, because a confused, muddied sound can result. To improve clarity, cut frequencies between 200Hz and 400Hz.

Compression

Compression serves a dual purpose when you're recording drums. It can be used firstly to even out the dynamic range of a signal, and secondly as a creative effect to alter the sound of the instrument.

The bass drum is the fundamental instrument in the kit, and it is imperative that it provides a steady, even beat. Compression is invariably used to help achieve this, by ironing out any inconsistencies in the playing. Generally, use a fairly high ratio (between 4:1 and 10:1) and adjust the threshold control to achieve the desired amount of compression. Compression can be used more heavily on drums than on melodic instruments, and 5dB or more of gain reduction is not excessive. As the amount of compression is increased, the character of the sound begins to change: a heavily compressed bass drum sounds tighter and more solid. It's also worth experimenting with different attack settings: a fast attack produces a 'thuddy' sound, whereas a slow attack lets the initial transient go through uncompressed, to give a click at the start of the beat. Compression can often also be used to good effect on the snare drum.

Gating

Most engineers encounter severe problems in achieving good separation between the hi-hat and other instruments; in fact it tends to bleed through onto virtually every microphone, no matter what efforts are made to reduce spill. A gate can be used where it is necessary to obtain greater separation between instruments; for example, if you want to process or add an effect to a specific instrument. The gate is set so that it opens to let signal through as soon as the instrument is hit, and closes again when the sound has finished or died away.

Great care must be taken when setting up gates. In particular, the trigger level must be set so that the gate opens on every beat of the instrument being gated, but is not triggered by any of the instruments which are spilling over.
Setting the trigger level can be problematic. To return to the example of spillage from the hi-hat into the snare microphone, it will be often be found that the level of the spill is as high, or almost as high, as the level of the sound from the snare, so a way must be found to get the gate to trigger from the snare beats only. This can be accomplished either by using a gate with a side-chain filter, or by means of an external key input.

As an example, let through snare drum frequencies without allowing the hi-hat to open the gate. The filter must thus be set to let through a frequency band which is strong on the snare but weak on the hi-hat, such as frequencies below 3kHz. To do this, set the low-pass filter to this frequency. The hi-hat will not then trigger the gate, because most of its acoustic energy is above 5kHz. Alternatively, an external signal can be fed to the key input of the gate, replacing the side-chain signal and controlling the opening and closing of the gate.
In practice, gating drums to achieve separation is always a compromise. Although spill can be eliminated when the gate is closed, the spill will still be there when the gate is open and will affect the sound of other instruments, as each mic picks up all the instruments in the kit to a certain degree.

Reverb

Reverb is an important constituent of any modern drum sound, but it is equally important that the drums should not be swamped with a reverb which hangs on for too long and does not decay between drum beats, resulting in a muddy and indistinct sound. It's best to use a reverb with a short decay time (generally no more than 1.5 seconds), and to cut some of the low-frequency content from the reverb.

Try assigning the toms, snare and hi-hat a short, crisp plate program, with a reverb time of 1.2 seconds. A reverb with a longer decay time can be used on the overheads: cymbals, particularly, can be enhanced by a longer reverb. Try sending the overheads to the main reverb, using a hall programme with a decay of about 1.5 seconds. But these reverb times are a guide only, and you should set your effects to suit the particular track. Generally, fast songs require a shorter reverb time, to allow the reverb to decay between beats and thus avoid blurring the sound.

Watch out when using reverb on the bass drum, because it tends to make the sound muddy and ponderous rather than punchy and dynamic. The exception is gated reverb, which can work well as a special effect, but should be used sparingly. This type of reverb continues to be popular, although the clichéd Phil Collins snare sound must surely have had its day. The easiest way to achieve this kind of sound is by using a dedicated preset on a multi-effects processor. Alternatively, the output of a digital reverb set to an ordinary reverb programme can be fed to a noise gate, and the attack, hold and release controls set to envelope-shape the output, to give the characteristic 'burst' of reverb abruptly cut off. If you are recording in a large, live space with a pleasant natural reverb, it's worth putting up mics at a distance from the kit to capture the ambience, and feeding the signal from these to a gate in order to envelope-shape it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Home | Recording Work | Education Area | Schemes of Work | Assignments | Mailing List | Links | Search | Contact