Friday, April 19, 2024
What I Wish My Sound Guy Knew About Mixing Drums
Church Production Magazine: One of the most common conflicts between the platform and the booth is within the drum cage. Both the drummer and the sound engineer have an idea of what they want the drums to sound like, feel like and how they should be experienced within the mix. The challenge is that often their ideas of how to accomplish excellent drum mixes are different.
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4 comments:
This was an especially interesting read for, particularly because one of the things I am terrible at is mixing drums. To be fair, this is mostly due to the fact that most of what I have done up to this point is mix vocals with tracks or when I have mixed drums, I only had enough mics to act as overall drum mics, rather than micing the individual drums. I also don't 100% agree with this article that sound check should only be used for rehearsal, ideally you have separate rehearsal and sound check times, as you don't want to be majorly changing things in the first song. I've also not met many musicians that refer to sound check as rehearsal, but to be fair I mostly work in theatre where the system is set up and tuned over Tech, and you have a short sound check every night which is very different from this article's intended audience of audio engineers working in churches.
I thought this article was very interesting. I personally do not know a whole lot about mixing in general however I know that properly mixing drums can be a Challenge. As the article says, typically the sound engineer and the drummer will have different ideas about the way the drums should sound which can make it very difficult to mix. I think it is interesting that the article said rehearsals are not intended for mixing.. I had never really thought about it before but to be honest it makes sense, especially in a church setting. The two main tips the article offers is to mix the drums volume on the lower side during rehearsal so when the performance comes it is more balanced. However I can see where this could be a little bit of a challenge. Secondly, the article suggests trying compression on drums. In the end I found the article to be very informative.
This all makes a lot of sense. if I was very intimately familiar with an instrument, in this case it is the drums, I would want to talk with my sound guy about how they should be mixed. I think the directionality and very high variance in tone of the drums I'm not even based on what day it is is so fair. it makes lots of sense that these instruments are so heavily dependent on their surroundings and it's very interesting to me. I think as a sound designer it's very important to listen to the people you're collaborating with, especially if they have an intimate knowledge of something. I remember I was talking to Zac Brown and he said that sometimes he would just let some artists design for themselves, meaning that he had people mixing for themselves, for their in-ear monitors. less insurance that they can hear what they need to hear, and that everyone's happy.
This is an interesting read. I don’t have a lot of experience on a mixer but I’ve mic’d up a good amount of drum kits and watched professionals mix drums enough to think that I have a good grasp on what this article is saying. In my experience, the drum kit always takes the longest to check because naturally, every drum has its own mic that really needs to be checked as if it were a vocal. I always think it’s kind of funny that, at least on the systems I usually work on, the drum kit gets its own fader page. I think it’s interesting just how dynamic the drum mix can be compared to other instruments – guitars, for example, usually need less adjustment than a drum kit over the course of a set. I have an immense amount of respect for people that can actually mix well; it’s such a unique combination of different skills and bits of knowledge. It’s really fun to watch a skilled person mix live music.
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