Studio Mix Without Processing
Now let’s break down the mix so you can hear how it was put together.
First, here’s a mix of the studio drum solo without any EQ or effects.
The sound is not too exciting, is it? Let’s work on one track at a time.
Kick
This is the raw sound of the kick-drum track—with no EQ and no gating:
You can hear some leakage into the kick-drum mic, and the kick lacks punch. I added some EQ and gating as shown below.
Here’s the result:
The EQ and gate settings are shown here (at left).
It’s common to cut around 400 Hz on a kick-drum signal to remove the “papery” sound and to tighten the beat. I also added some beater click at 4 kHz, and brought up the low end slightly.
The gate threshold was set to pass the kick drum but remove most of the leakage.
Snare
Let’s move on to the snare drum. It lacked clarity and sounded kind of puffy:
The EQ shown at right really helped to define the snare sound.
Some cut around 600 Hz, a shelving boost above 4 kHz, and a little peaking EQ boost at 195Hz made the snare drum sound more “expensive”.
Of course, that EQ might not work with a different snare drum.