Drums delay can be used to add some ear candy or more practically to add some fatness and sustain to the drums in your mix. Let’s talk drums delay and how you can use it in your next mix to enhance both your drums as well as the mix.
Drums Delay
First, let’s talk the more practical application of applying drums delay to add sustain to the back end of the drum(s) of your choice in your kit.
As I covered in my overview of the Haas effect, when we hear two of the same sound less than 40ms apart, we perceive it as the same sound:
We can use this principle to our drums delay and thicken out the drum of our choice by adding sustain on the back end.
My favorite use of a short delay on drums is specifically the snare, especially when your snare is lacking thickness and general size in the mix.
We can supplement our snare with some EQ for body, add audio transient punch to the top end to help it cut through the mix, and even get a bit more sustain and size via snare compression.
Actually, just check out my complete snaring mixing guide for simplicity sake… but regardless, snare delay is a great way to help a weak snare sit better in the mix.
Here I’m using it as an insert directly on my snare track or bus:
I love these settings for drums delay in general, and the same settings can be applied to a kick drum if that kick is dropped off too quickly, even after kick compression.
Delay Time
The delay time is the key factor here in your drums delay because, unless you’re going for some kind of reflective effect, you’ll again want to keep it sub 40ms.
I like going for 80% of that maximum, or roughly 32ms on drums delay.
This may vary from mix to mix so feel free to experiment, but in my experience 32ms ensures that there’s no separation while giving you the thickness by way of more sustain out of whatever drum you’re applying it to.
This is great on the “drums” drums of your kit like the kick, snare, and toms.
Filters
Most delay plugins (like the above pictured EchoBoy) have onboard filters for high and low pass filtering the tone of the delayed signal.
Because we’re using delay as an extension of the drum here, the filter setup you go with will impact the overall tone.
For instance, run that low cut/high pass filter up and you start to eat into the body of the drum and sound strange when the back half (delayed) of the drum suddenly sounds thinner.
You’ll likely want to avoid high passing any higher than any EQ you already have on that drum, but even then, the delay is taking that post-filtered instance of the drum’s audio (assuming the delay is AFTER the EQ in the signal chain), so it’s likely not necessary.
If you use this short delay on any cymbals like the hi-hat which I’ll do on occasion, you likewise don’t want to pull down that high cut/low pass filter too aggressively as you’ll lose the presence of that cymbal on the back end.
Filters on your drums delay work better when you’re going with a longer time and clear separation, like some slapback delay which I’ll talk about in a moment. Running that high cut/low pass filter down closer to 1k will make that delayed signal sound muffled, giving that delay the sound of a more realistic reflection.
Width
Some delays feature a width setting to allow you to control the spread of that delayed signal across the mix. This allows you to keep that signal in the middle, in the middle spread out to the sides, or exclusively on the sides.
While you can certainly use drums delay to get some width (which I could do with EchoBoy simply by changing the mode to Dual Echo), when we’re using it to simply add some padded sustain, I like to leave this off.
Feedback
Feedback is extra reflections as a product of feedback, so we want to keep this at 0%. This ensures there’s no subsequent reflections as we just want that initial delay to hit fast to add sustain then die off.
Mix
The “Mix” percentage dictates the ratio of the delayed signal to the “dry” signal.
Setting this to 0% would mean we obviously don’t hear the delay at all.
Setting this to 100% would mean we’re exclusively hearing the delay. In this example, our snare would just be heard 32ms later than it should with the delay at 100% because that’s all we’re hearing.
And lastly, a 50% setting is an even split of dry and delayed drums.
While that might seem what you want to get the maximum sustain, I find setting the “Mix” percentage somewhere between 15-30% sounds the most natural.
This preserves that initial drum sound with transient hit while giving you the desired sustain on the back.
Aesthetic/Ear Candy Drums Delay
I covered my favorite settings for adding some thickness to our drums when necessary, but as I mentioned in opening, drums delay makes for some great ear candy from time to time.
This purpose of delay on drums is admittedly much more open ended.
Minus the Bear use delay on the kit to create a very pleasant layering effect for the opening on their 2010 track, “My Time”, layering more and more (through mixing automation the feedback parameter up), not to mention high passing or pitching higher and higher until it becomes a high frequency blob:
This creates a very pleasing and exciting dynamic change as they dive into the song headfirst for the clean change into the song in proper.
I referenced slapback delay earlier. This can work well to create more size in your drums while acknowledging that it’s a clean break, somewhat simulating the natural acoustic reflections of a very small room.
In my overview of slapback delay, I specifically talked about some settings I like to apply to my snare to make it sound larger in the mix.
We’re going to exceed the Haas effect 40ms obviously here as the intent is to create a clear break and reflection.
I like 60-100ms, and I’d favor the shorter side for a faster BPM and likewise for a slower BPM for your song.
Once again, we’re keeping that mix percentage low with zero feedback to create just a taste of that reflection to add to the size of the snare (or whatever drum we’re applying it to).
Experiment with slapback or any kinds of drum delay in your mix when using it for some tasty ear candy; there are no boundaries or wrong uses.
Remember, however, that like most instances of effects for ear candy, using drum delay in this setting you’ll want to introduce and utilize it sparingly in moderation to keep the listener locked in. Try it for small sections like an intro or outro, a bridge, or a short transition bar or two.
