I recently did a complete overview on how to mix drums, including detailed EQ cheat sheets and compression cheat sheets for every single piece of the kit. While processing individual pieces in your kit is a huge part of getting your drums as a whole to sound their best, I love adding processing to the drum bus itself to add a little cohesion, energy, thickness, and other enhancements to the kit as a whole.
Let’s focus on the drum bus itself and talk how to process it with some simple processing which can make your entire kit sound appreciably better.
How to Process Your Drum Bus
First and foremost, make sure you’re using my mixing template so that you have that hierarchy and the individual drums in your kit are flowing into a collective drum bus.
As always with mixer busses, less is more and it’s best to be conservative. This is because every move you make on a bus affects multiple tracks and therefore will be that much more impactful than if it was targeting one track in isolation.
With that primer, let’s go down the signal chain from start to finish.
Drum Bus EQ
Drums are all about their collective sound, so while it’s no substitute for individual EQ moves (see my drum EQ chart), a few tweaks via an EQ on the drum bus itself can address issues which arise from that collection or just to nudge the entire kit in the right direction.
Taken from my drum bus EQ overview, here are the moves I like to make to adjust the sound of the entire drum kit:
High Pass 20Hz
20Hz is as low as you can practically high pass anything in your mix because we can’t hear below 20Hz but it still creates some mixing headroom by getting rid of the lowest frequencies which are just building up and creating low end boom.
You can go a bit higher; obviously on the entire drum kit it’s the kick which is existing on the lowest end of the frequency spectrum. The body of the kick is typically in the 50-80Hz range, so you can go up to 40Hz without worry of digging into that low end of the kick’s fundamental, albeit with a steep EQ slope of 24dB/oct or more.
If you’re sweeping up from 20Hz, make sure you’re listening on speakers or headphones with a response which will allow you to hear what you’re cutting (or use the visual analyzer via an EQ like FabFilter Pro-Q 3 has.
Dynamic Boost at 65Hz for Kick
This is the first instance of a dynamic EQ move, meaning the band only cuts or in this case boosts when a threshold is met.
Because we’re dealing with the drum bus, we can get some of the lowest end of the snare triggering below 100Hz, albeit and obviously at a quieter level than the kick itself.
By making the band at 65Hz dynamic, we can set the threshold so that it only triggers when we get a large enough surge there which only the kick can create.
This boosts the body of the kick when it triggers without boosting the rest of the drums otherwise which will just make them sound needlessly boomy.
Boost at 200Hz for Body
200Hz brings out more body from the snare, toms, and even the low end of the cymbals. A little static/conventional boost here can make the kit sound more powerful, but remember less is more; I’m talking a small bump of 1dB or so at most.
Dynamic Cut at 500Hz to Mitigate Boxiness
You’ll likely find a lot of overlapping reflections and boxy, claustrophobic, muddy, and generally unflattering frequencies building at 500Hz.
Try a small dynamic cut here so that it’s only controlling this range (with a band Q/width of 100Hz on either side) when necessary, pulling out 1-2dB at most.
Boost at 1k for Energy
You can bring out some energy and roundness of the kit with a small boost at 1k. Don’t boost too much or you’ll hear some unwanted wonkiness and bring out the snare ringing which occurs around this frequency.
Dynamic Boost at 3.5k and 5k for Transient Punch
The transient punch of the kick and snare occur at 3.5k and 5k, respectively, with the punch of the toms occurring in between this range.
Transients are all about instrument assertion, or in other words they draw the listener’s ear to that track in the mix. When you’re listening to your mix and it feels like a track is disappearing despite being at a good level, it may be from a lack of transient punch.
Small boosts at the mentioned frequency points can help those tracks cut through mixes at the busiest of times to stay present.
Boosts in this range also add a little clarity to the kit if the kit needs a little added liveliness.
High Shelf at 10k for Cymbal Sizzle
We can bring out more of that top end transient and sizzle on the cymbals with a small high shelf. This also gives the kit a little more brightness without adding any harshness.
Low Pass at 22k for Headroom
This one is optional and admittedly conservative; low passing at 22k is well above what the ear can perceive, so this can create a modicum of added headroom in the mix because it’s being applied to the entire bus. I like to low pass my entire instrumental bus at 22k without worry of sacrificing any audible overtones for the same reason.
Drum Bus Saturation
I like to sneak a little saturation in between the EQ and compression on my drum bus when it needs a little extra fattening.
I especially like to use Decapitator from Soundtoys’ saturation on sampled drums or electronic drums to give them a little more of that analog warmth and realism.
One of the best things about this plugin in particular is it’s dirt simple to use and get good results.
All you really need to do is pick a style (I like “E” or “T” on drums in particular for beefing up the low end while keeping the top end clean and smooth – check out my overview on the Decapitator style buttons for more info), turn the drive up to 1-3 (or don’t), and adjust the mix to the desired sound (I typically set this around 20-35% to just get a shade of the saturation).
Leave the low and high cut dials at their extreme left and right positions, respectively, to keep them from cutting and affecting the tone.
Drum Bus Glue Compression
We’ve gone ahead and compressed every piece of our kit individually (as per my drum compression chart), but a little compression on the drum bus itself can help bring all of the pieces together to make them feel like more of a cohesive unit.
While you can use any compressor to do this, I prefer a VCA style for some glue compression.
As the name suggests, a glue compressor is useful for tying multiple tracks together to create a sense of cohesion.
Taken from my drum bus compression cheat sheet, here are the settings I like to use for compression on the drum bus:
Displayed is the Waves G-Master Buss Compressor which is modeled after the analog SSL 4000 G-Series Console mixing desk, or specifically its Solid State Logic’s analog bus compressor.
The parameters are very straightforward on this style compressor.
Threshold
In going back to what I said at the top, less is more with bus processing, including compression.
I’m looking to just nudge those peaks down ever so gently, applying 1-2dB of gain reduction on average with a max of 2-3dB at the busiest moments during the performance.
You should set the threshold to reflect this, but the threshold works with the rest of the parameters to achieve this target.
Ratio
You’ll find on most glue compressors which model these analog desks that you’ll have typically 3 static positions for ratio.
2:1 will gently nudge those peaks down, but the gain reduction will vary more widely between 0-3dB and will ultimately preserve more dynamics. This is usually my go to setting and is certainly the most conservative and transparent option.
If I want to impart more energy into the drums by way of less dynamic range and a slightly more consistent level by way of that compression, I’ll tick this up to 4:1. Try both while adjusting the threshold to account for the change to see what you prefer.
You might try duplicating the compressor, then set up a hot key to make transitioning between the two seamless after you’ve got each set up with the right settings with each ratio to split test them.
Attack
I like an attack of 3ms or 10ms with glue compression on the drum bus. These are relatively slower attacks which delay the compression once the threshold is met for the specified amount of time so that the initial transient “bite” of the kick, snare, toms, etc. is preserved.
Release
Auto release works well for tracks with complex dynamics like drums, so I’ll usually default to this. Truthfully most busses have complex dynamics by virtue of having multiple tracks feeding into it, so this is typically what I’ll go with whenever compressing a bus.
Output
Make sure you don’t fall into the trap of assuming whatever compression settings you dialed in sound great just because the output gain is more than making up for the gain reduction. Toggle back and forth with the compression on and off to ensure you have the output gain set so that the level is consistent with or without the compression.
Drum Bus Parallel Compression
Parallel compression on the drum bus is one of the most important bits of processing I add to my drums in general, bus or otherwise.
Parallel processing refers to taking an effect, dialing in aggressive settings, and blending it in alongside an untouched or “dry” instance of a track or bus.
As such, we can use this via a send from its own Aux/Return track or insert it via a Grouping to create a secondary chain within the chain.
I’ve talked more about implementing parallel processing in the past, but however you choose to implement it, parallel compression can add a lot of thickness and energy to your drums without compromising the original instance of that audio.
Here is a snapshot of the ideal parallel compression settings:
It’s pretty straightforward; simply use a maxed out ratio, an instant attack and hard knee, average release (100ms works), and set the threshold just below the quietest practical moment of the drums, meaning the quietest instance where the drums are playing, whatever that might be.
The idea with parallel compression is squashing out the dynamics of the audio, in this case the entire drum kit. This crushed version of your kit sounds unnatural on its own, but it’s all about the mixture we get from blending it in with the normal drum bus.
However you chose to implement the parallel compression, blend it in to taste alongside/under the dry drums of the drum bus track.
I like the added thickness and energy you get with parallel compression on drums, so I’m less conservative than I normally am when it comes to parallel processing when it comes to drums.
Compression isn’t the only effect to blend in via parallel processing; you might use some aggressively distorted saturation with the drive turned all the way up (with “Punish” set to on) to blend in alongside your drums in the same way and give them a little extra edge.
Drum Bus Reverb
You can dial in some custom reverb into your drum bus (possibly using some impulse response reverb to emulate the spaces of your favorite recorded drums), but typically if I’m doing that then I’m blending some of the room reverb I’ve already got working via an Aux/Return track.
This is why I put this last in this list; it’s technically not part of the processing chain but own its own Aux/Return track blended in via the send dial on the bus (see sends vs inserts).
Here is a snapshot of my preferred best reverb settings which I like to use for any mix, simply adjusting the size/space as necessary in my preferred reverb, FabFilter Pro-R 2:
Keeping this on an Aux/Return track, make sure the Wet/Dry is set to 100% wet so that when we send it to any tracks, we’re exclusively getting the Wet/full reverb being blended into that track.
In the case of our drum bus, I like to use these settings and turning the send dial up on the drum bus for this respective Aux/Return track until I can just hear the difference on the drums when I mute this Aux/Return track.
Do you do anything else when it comes to processing your drum bus? Leave a comment and let me know any effects you like to work in to get your drums sounding their best before they move on to the instrument or main mix bus.
