Mixing Electronic Drums Explained
Music production wiz Thomas Cochran presents a set of comprehensive video tutorials on mixing electronic drums! If you've ever wondered how to make your electronic drums sound full, exciting, and punchy, this is the course to watch. Thomas gives you several strategies -- dealing with both individual sounds as well as the entire E-drum kit -- that will help transform your drum sounds from flat to phat! These videos are for those new to the subject of mixing electronic drums.
Enhancing Samples
• Layering & Editing Kicks (12:56) - Thomas introduces the course and shows how layering and editing the playback of drum samples can enhance the sound of a track before starting on your mix.
• Layering & Editing Snares (15:31) - This video builds off the first video and talks about editing and layering snares and claps. Also learn about the best practices for sample selection.
Mixing Samples
• Kick Mixing (13:21) - Learn how to blend multiple kick samples together using EQ and processing. This allows for much cleaner layering of kick samples and lets you dial in the exact sound you need for a track.
• Clap Mixing (12:45) - Discover how to process claps sounds to add fullness and snap to a production.
• Snare Mixing (12:15) - Explore how to blend multiple snare sounds together to create custom drums that are tailored for your songs. This video also shows how bit reduction can be used to attenuate unwanted detail and resonance in your drums sounds.
• Mixing Hi-Hats & Shaker (13:50) - Learn all about how to best attenuate harsh sounding hi-hats and shakers. Also discover how saturation can be used to enhance sounds and make them fuller so they better fill up the song.
• Auto-Panning Percussion for Depth (04:41) - Thomas demonstrates how creative parallel auto panning can inject life into a simple percussion loop. This not only adds stereo width but creates more rhythmic interest.
• Adding Groove to Percussion with Track Spacer (05:00) - Next, learn how adding a side-chain effect can add rhythm to the percussion loop. Instead of using a regular compressor, Thomas shows how an adaptive eq plugin can be used for a more natural sounding side-chaining.
• Tips for Mixing Bright Percussion (14:04) - Discover how to take a bright percussion loop and make it sound warm and analogue. By using adaptive EQ and multi-band transient shaping, we can sculpt how we want a sound to respond in a track.
• Processing 808's (10:33) - Learn multiple ways of approaching 808?s in a mix. This video covers low-end enhancement, parallel distortion, and corrective EQ to get a full-sounding 808.
Bus Processing
• Bus Processing with Soothe2 & Distortion (08:02) - This video demonstrates how the Soothe2 plugin can be combined with a tube distortion to add clarity and fullness to the entire drum bus.
• Parallel Compression & EQ (13:06) - Discover how parallel processing can be used across the entire drum kit to add presence, snap, and fullness. Running effects in parallel allows for more detailed control over how the effects are blended into the original signal.
• Adding Low End to the Drum Bus (06:28) - Next, take a look at how the plugin R-Bass can be used to add low-end weight and sub frequencies to the whole drum mix. This plugin also ensures that the lows can be clearly heard on sound systems that don't have low sub frequency response.
• Transient Shaping on the Drum Bus (07:14) - In the final video of the course, Thomas demonstrates how adaptive multi-band transient shaping with the Spiff plugin can be used to emulate the punchy mid-range clarity of a hardware preamp.