Tips for Enhancing a Drum Loop in the Mix

🎧 Train your ears in just minutes a day: https://quiztones.com 🤖 AI-powered learning for producers & engineers: https://ai.theproaudiofiles.com/join 📺 Get unlimited premium mix training: https://theproaudiofiles.com/members David Glenn demonstrates some advanced tips for creating a larger than life sound out of a single drum loop. — Transcript Excerpt: Hey, what's up guys? My name is David Glenn of theproaudiofiles.com and davidglennrecording.com, home of the free VIP mix training bundle. If you haven't done so yet, go check that out and join the list. You're going to get two sets of multi-tracks, a whole slew of impulse responses, two free video series, and a ton more. So I appreciate you for checking that out, I know you're going to love it. It's free, so no excuses, right? Moving into today's video, we've got a drum loop, and I've called this “Advanced Drum Loop Mixing.” Not quite sure what to say about it, but I've got a process that I went through for this mix that I'm doing for themixacademy.com, and I felt like it was worthy of a specific tutorial video for The Pro Audio Files. So I've got a loop here, and I'm going to play you – maybe I'll solo the loop, and then I'm going to breakdown and show you what I've done. I've created a kick from the loop, and then I've done a ton of processing to get this to kind of come forward and shine in this particular mix. So here's the loop by itself. [drum loop] Okay. Here's what it sounded like before I touched it. [drum loop] I'm going to boost the volume... Okay. So I've labeled it DG loop, but that's kind of selfish of me. This is not my loop. I didn't record this, I didn't piece it together, I don't know where it came from. It came to me from the client. What I wanted to do was in the mix – let me actually play it for you in the mix and see if you can... [song plays] Okay, so obviously, you can't really hear it. There's a little bit of the kick thing going on and some ghosting on the snare/hat kind of thing, but it needed to come forward and it needed to shine, and more than just becoming brighter. So I'm going to walk you through what I did to it, and then what I did to it at the chorus will be kind of a part two, second half of the tutorial. So anyways, first things first. Let me walk you through the plug-ins. Nothing fancy here. All I did with this was we have a kick drum, we have a live drum kit separate from this loop, so what I wanted to do was make sure that none of this kick's bottom end interfered with the live drum kit whenever that comes in, so I filtered everything out below 85, and that is very basically going to sound like this. There's another reason why I did this, but I'll show you in a second. So here's before the filter. [drum loop plays] After. [loop, filtered] Okay. So you can here, we're just getting rid of the sub in the kick for the most part in the loop. The second plug-in here in the chain is the Kush Clariphonic, and this is the second revision of it. We'll call it take two. It's updated and it sounds incredible – it sounds nasty. The first one sounded great. This one sounds even better. The first one, it had a glitch where it would crash Pro Tools. I don't know if that was my fault, an update I missed or something, but the second one sounds ridiculous, so I highly recommend you go check this one out. I'm just boosting a ton of top end, and you'll hear that this really comes forward in the mix. Here's before. [drum loop] After. [drum loop with Clariphonic] Okay. So, a ton of top end. You can see I'm using the Clarity, the Shimmer setting. Moving on from that, I felt like it just needed to be smashed. I just wanted to smash the loop to my taste. I felt like I wasn't going to go parallel so much, but I'm going to show you one of my new favorite compressors. To bring this forward, I smashed it, and then I blended in some dry in parallel. So let's check that out. Here's before and after. [loop, before and after compression] Sounds nasty, right? Well, by itself, it may not sound that great, but in the context of the mix, it sounds incredible to my ears. So I'm going to play it again, but before and after – actually, I'll play before and after for both of these. [song, before and after plug-ins] Okay, so you can really hear that loop is a big part of this song, and the reference track he gave me was Love Me Again from Jonathan – I forget the guy's last name, but it was a great track from like, 2013. I really loved that song. Saturation, everything sounds incredible, but the compression really helped it just pull it forward and did amazing work. That's the +10 dB compressor from Boz Digital Labs, and my new friend David Bendeth. Love the work that they're doing. Lots of great stuff to come from them. [truncated]