Little Known Ways to Add Power to Your Drum Sound

Make your drum sound awesome.

How else are people going to notice?

Beginners often struggle with making their drums sound punchy and powerful but don’t know where to start or how to accomplish that tight produced drum sound that they hear in their head(or on other records.) A few different techniques can be used when you just can’t seem to figure out how to make that drum track sound great.

Limiting the snare

The snare is the back-beat of the drum sound. So obviously it must be given a lot of attention when mixing. A weak and thin snare just results in a fluffy sound that is unusable and lame compared to the rest of the instruments. Getting a powerful snare sound can be achieved with compression, but if you want to take your snare drum even further you should try a limiter instead. If you are not working with a particularly dynamic snare track you can push the limiter pretty hard, therefore increasing the overall volume of the track and its punchiness.

The only drawback might be that the initial transient of the snare will be pretty limited, but the overall power of the snare might make it worth it. Alternatively, try it in parallel!

Compressing the overheads

Use compression to lift up the overall volume of the drum-kit. Make it stand out more with added punch. You do run the risk of increasing the room sound and the noise floor by compressing a lot, but whatever. Sometimes a nice compression push on the overheads can elevate the drum sound in the mix.

Buss compression

Buss compression, parallel compression or the “New York Compression Trick” gives your drums a powerful sound without compromising the dynamics of the drummer’s playing. By copying your drum tracks via sends and applying powerful compression on the copied tracks you can get the best of both worlds: natural playing with a powerful sound.

Drum replacement

Of course, when all else fails and you just can’t get any of the drum mixing tricks to work you might need to resort to drum replacement. Drum replacement is used when you are either working with really shitty sounding tracks that no amount of mixing can save them or you want to enhance and accent the pre-recorded drum tracks with samples. The latter is used a lot in modern music production in order to retain a human feel to drum tracks that are sometimes made to sound like electronic loops.

What’s the Rest Then?

There are an abundance of different mixing techniques you can use to make your drums sound better. Familiarize yourself with all the different mixing techniques you need to get a great drum sound: levels, panning, compression and EQ. Make your tracks sound good with the basics before you add the sugar on top and make them great.

For more quick and easy drum tips, check out my Drum Mix Toolkit here.

image by: Notsogoodphotography

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