Fattening Drums With Multiple Busses – Mixing Tutorial

Fattening Drums With Multiple Busses

Fattening Drums With Multiple Busses

Fattening Drums With Multiple Busses

In a recent issue of FutureMusic Russ Chimes talks about how he uses busses for drums in Logic to get a fatter drum sound.  He is using Logic, but obviously the same method can be applied to your DAW.  Here’s how he does it:

1. Let’s say you have 4 audio tracks with various drum elements on them.  Get the levels of these so that they sound good to you and seem balanced.

2. Now route all of your drum tracks to a buss and label it “Drum Buss”.  (If that confuses you it’s worth googling how to set up a mix buss as it’s a fundamental tool in your mixing/producing process.) On this drum buss, he adds a chanel EQ with slight boosts at 80Hz and 6kHz. He also adds a Logic compressor to this buss, set on the Platinum circuit type and with a gentle 1:5:1 ratio.

3. Now route all of your drum tracks to a secondary buss – the next available buss makes the most sense. Name this buss “Fattener”.  Again, he adds a channel EQ but this time with a more dramatic boost at 100Hz and 10kHz. Also, he adds another compressor here, this time set on the class AR circuit with a hard ratio of 8:7:1.

The main idea here is that the fattener channel works as a little turbo-boost to your original drums.  As you introduce this to the mix, you should hear your drums fatten up nicely – you won’t need to add much of the fattener to get the desired effect.

4. Now, when he’s happy with both buss levels, he sends both the busses to a final, 3rd buss. On this channel he adds a PSP Vintage Warmer. He also places any effects for the drums here. The 3rd buss channel is useful, in that you can control your overall level of  the drums from here, without having to mess with the other busses or individual drum tracks.

**He doesn’t mention it, but it would make sense that you have all your busses set to “pre” and bring the track levels of the original drum tracks all the way down with the buss sends set to 100%…this way all you are getting is the audio of the busses mixed together and you won’t have flanging issues. (We’ve done a little post on Pre/Post Fader here on the blog if that confuses you).

Obviously, Russ is using Logic, but as stated you could use this principle with any DAW and set of plugins that you  have at your disposal.

Hopefully playing with a similar setup will yield better results for your drums.

Fattening Drums With Multiple Busses

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