Mixing with BFD
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD Contents 4 1. Introduction 4 5 1:1. Processed vs unprocessed sounds 1:2. Originality and creativity 6 2. Programming Techniques 6 7 8 9 10 11 11 2:1. ‘The obvious stuff’ 2:2. Velocity layers and Dynamics controls 2:3. Articulations 2:4. Damping 2:5. Layering 2:6. Keymapping tricks 2:7. Creating patterns 13 3. Mic channels, outputs, mixing levels and panning 13 13 14 15 16 17 18 3:1. Mic channels and controlling ambience levels 3:2. Output routing 3:3. Bleed 3:4.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 28 6. Creative processing 28 28 29 29 29 30 6:1. Other dynamics processors 6:2. Artificial reverb 6:3. Recreating retro sounds 6:4. Resampling and re-sequencing 6:5. Distortion and re-amping 6:6. Noise 31 7. A demonstration of getting a good drum sound practical guide to drum processing, with audio examples and pictures of A processor settings. 35 8. How to approach mixing a song A rough guide to tackling a full mix.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 1. Introduction This guide is oriented around FXpansion’s BFD acoustic drum software, although much of it is very useful for all methods of production and mixing. If you don’t own BFD, you may want to download the demo version from www.fxpansion.com - working through this guide alongside BFD plugged into your favourite sequencing/mixing software can be a very educational and rewarding experience. 1:1.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 1:2. Originality and creativity It’s important to realise that drum production is something of a ‘dark art’, and people who are good at it, such as the guys who mixed your favourite records, have spent many years acquiring the knowledge and the skills to do it well. It is a creative process, and as dependent on experience and practice as any other creative process.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 2. Programming Techniques Before getting onto the subject of mixing drums, it’s good to ensure you have a reasonably decent-sounding drum track to begin with. You may have noticed the large scary BFD reference manual - read it! BFD has a huge amount of functionality to manipulate sounds even before they come out as separate channels in your host’s mixer. All these functions exist for a reason. So it’s vital to familiarize yourself with BFD’s capabilities.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD You can adjust ambience levels for each Kit-piece, using the Kit-piece Trim controls (as opposed to the Direct Trim). Therefore, if you need a tight kick but a huge snare, turn down the Kit-piece Trim on the kick and leave it up on the snare. These controls act like reverb sends, while the OH, Room and PZM faders are effectively like return levels for 3 different reverb algorithms.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD The Master Dynamics control is particularly useful, especially if you assign a MIDI controller to it for realtime automation. Program a drum track as normal, then record yourself ‘riding’ the Master Dynamics control over its duration with a MIDI controller. Pull it down slightly for the verses, and perhaps towards the end of the bar leading up to each chorus, start to pull it up to give the drums more intensity.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD • Hihats These have the most possible articulations of any Kit-Piece type. BFD contains closed and 1/2-open tip and shank, fully-open tip and pedal (‘foot-chick’) sounds. The expansion packs also include additional 1/4-open and 3 /4-open tip and shank sounds, which makes more varied and expressive hihat patterns possible.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD Damping is especially useful in groove-oriented music or songs with a fast tempo: shortening the decay of the drums can make them punchier and creates more space in the mix for other elements. Using the damping controls to a large degree (over 50%) is a much easier alternative to using gates to achieve similar effects. • Tightening closed hihats Damping on hihats is not usually appropriate, although the facility is provided if you would like to experiment.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 2:6. Keymapping tricks • Layering individual Hit types The Key2 parameter in the Advanced keymapper (Hit Options panel, Advanced tab) allows you to layer sounds on a Hit type level - as opposed to the Kit-piece level described above. So you could set the Key2 parameter for the Snare1 rim hit to trigger the Snare2 rim, while leaving the other Snare1 and Snare2 hits unlinked. You could also assign it to a drag, flam, percussion hit or a half-open tip hat for example...
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 1. Consider how a drummer would play a pattern. Most drummers have 2 hands and 2 feet: 4 limbs in total. It therefore logically follows that generally, up to 4 things can be played at any one time. It’s good to watch a few drumming videos (a good source of these can be found at drummerworld.com) or study some drum scores to get a better idea of how drum patterns are composed. 2.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 3. Mic channels, outputs, mixing levels and panning 3:1. Mic channels and controlling ambience levels You must pay close attention to the blend of mic channels. You don’t need every fader turned up to maximum, unless you specifically want a very live sound - a subtle amount of the ambient channels works wonders without taking over your song. Some situations simply don’t demand any ambience at all - turn them all down to zero for an intimate, dry and crisp sound.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD Like any aspect of mixing, no single method of bussing into further processing is inherently better than any other methods. Do whatever your creative instincts tell you is needed in the song.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD To put it simply, bleed is spill between the direct mic channels. When you mic up a drumkit with close mics for each drum/hat/cymbal, each mic will always pick up some sound from the other drums. This is obviously not a concern on mics like overheads/rooms/PZMs, as these are designed to pick up the sound of the whole kit anyway.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD It can also be useful not to go overboard on panning toms and cymbals. The default pan positions in BFD are to match up with the positions in the overheads. However, you don’t necessarily have to stick to these. Again, ambience channels can be good in mono, and reducing the stereo spread can give the drums more impact.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD All the kick drums in BFD, BFD XFL and Jazz & Funk Collection were recorded with both kick mics facing in the same relative direction, so the above phase concerns do not really apply. However, the phase-flip switch is provided if you want to experiment with inverting the phase. The Deluxe Collection kicks were recorded with the ‘inside’ mic actually on the beater-side of the kick skin, so it is effectively out of phase with the outside mic.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD • Mixing into the headroom of the system On a digital system, it’s very easy to make the mistake of running each channel peaking at close to 0 dB. This may have been sensible in the past, when 16-bit DACs were quite noisy when driven at less than their maximum resolution. However, in today’s pristine 24bit world this is no longer an issue in real terms, with even cheap converters being pretty decent in comparison to the early days of digital home recording.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD Get a feel for your monitoring environment. Listen to music you know well to get a reference point. However, always remember that commercial recordings are usually mastered with heavy brick-wall limiters and other mastering tools to make them ‘louder’. Even so, they will give you a decent reference for how to make different instruments sit together. Make sure that your monitors are placed optimally, ideally isolated on good speaker stands filled with sand or lead-shot.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 4. Processing techniques Before you start piling on the plugins, ask yourself if you really need to do it, and what you want to achieve at the end. It’s easy to slap on the processing because you want to ‘make it sound big’. However, will a huge, heavily squashed drum sound actually suit the context of the rest of your song? EQ (equalization) and compression can be used in a variety of ways.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD The functionality of modern DAWs in many ways eclipses what you could do in those big old-school studios: virtually unlimited tracks and processor instances only limited by the speed of your CPU, total recall, and so on. Unfortunately, the side-effect is that the freedom and convenience of computer-based DAWs has spoilt us to such a degree that many people find it impossible to perform basic tasks like creating a bus-send, or routing audio out of a multi-channel plugin.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 4:3. EQ and compressor routing There is no hard rule about the order in which you should place an EQ and compressor on a channel. However, bear in mind that an EQ placed before the compressor will have an effect on the way the compressor reacts to the signal. Single-band compressors are not usually ‘intelligent’: they simply respond to energy in the sound, regardless of where it occurs in the frequency spectrum.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD you’re going for extreme compression effects, a zero-attack, totally squished sound may be exactly what you want. It might be especially useful when using parallel compression techniques (see below). • Release Setting the release time to follow the natural decay of the drum will achieve the most natural-sounding response. Very long release times will tend to ‘level out’ the dynamics completely, as the compressor doesnt have long enough to recover between hits.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD • Use a MIDI controller! It can be a really good idea to map a compressor plugin’s parameters to a MIDI controller, so that more than one control can be adjusted at the same time. This way you can get a better feel for how the parameters interact to shape the sound. • Parallel compression Parallel compression is a very useful technique for drum mixing.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 5. How to approach mixing each part of the kit 5:1. Kicks The ‘low end thump’ of a kick lies in the 40-80 Hz range - many engineers refer to this as the ‘chest’ region - because you can feel it in your chest, rattling your ribcage! The main body of a kick exists in the 80-120 Hz range, with the the fundamental frequency of most kicks, depending on size, being at around 80 Hz. The body and resonance of the drum shell is found in the 160-500 Hz range.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD Cutting the low mids at around 250-400 Hz will ‘open up’ the sound of the drum, while removing some mids at 700 Hz will reduce the ‘bark’ of the snare. The crack and attack of the snare is usually to be found between 2 to 7 kHz. If it’s any lower than 2 kHz it will tend to ‘honk’. Boosting some very high frequencies at around 1215 kHz really accentuates the ultra-high-end ‘sizzle’.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD If you want thunderous toms, use larger ones! Don’t stick to preset conventions on tom selection. BFD allows you to mix and match toms, so you can assemble custom tom sets. Two floor toms and a rack tom can be great, even if the 2 floor toms are not from the same set - once they are EQ’d and compressed in the mix it is very hard to tell that they’re from different kits.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 6. Creative processing 6:1. Other dynamics processors Gates are a good way of recreating older drum sounds, such as those used in soul and funk records. You can achieve different results to using the built-in damping in BFD, so feel free to experiment! Transient modification processors like SPL Transient Designer or Sony Transient Modulator can be very useful in shaping the attack and release of parts of the kit.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 6:3. Recreating retro sounds To get older drum sounds from the 50’s and 60’s, experiment with strange panning perhaps keep the drums predominantly in one channel, although it can still be useful not to pan the kick in order to keep a strong centre image. It can also be useful to roll off some high-end to simulate an ‘old-school’ sound, as well as employing techniques like gating (or BFD’s built-in damping).
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 6:6. Noise Talking of organic vibes, don’t be afraid of noise. At the risk of sounding rather controversial, its presence in a mix can actually make the mix sound warmer, more organic and more ‘alive’. A noise-free digital production can really risk sounding clinical, flat and lifeless.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 7. A demonstration of getting a good drum sound The following guide, along with the sound examples, is a practical application of getting a raw drum mix together. All the sound examples are linked below, or can be downloaded as a Zip file here. 1. Default sound 1-default_sound.mp3 This is BFD as it sounds with no processing at all. It is the raw BFD output with default mixer settings, using a custom kit comprised of various BFD expansion packs. 2. Dry sound 2-dry_sound.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD Snare channels Some low-end boost is added to the top snare channel with small cut in the mid-range to remove some of the ‘ring’ of the undamped snare. There is also a boost at about 6 kHz. A touch of compression is added, with a high ratio (8:1). The threshold is set fairly high, so that the compressor will only react to the loudest hits. Top snare mic The bottom snare channel is set up in much the same way but some bass roll-off is also applied.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 4. Bus compressing the kick 4-comp_kicks.mp3 The kick channels are processed through their own bus compressors. These add the neccessary punch to the sound of the kick drum. The same settings were used for each kick channel’s bus compressor. Kick In Kick Out 5. Bringing back the overheads and treating the cymbals 5-overhead.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 7. Re-introducing the room and PZM channels 7-room+PZM.mp3 Bringing the room and PZM channels back into the mix adds further spatial dimensions to the drum mix. The PZM channels are EQ’d, with a heavy cut in the low-end and some top-end boost.They are also gated, so that they sound quite thin and short. When the room sound is mixed in, you don’t hear an obvious gating effect.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD 8. How to approach mixing a song If you’re feeling a little lost and don’t know where to start, perhaps these guidelines will help you. Make sure you read the rest of the ‘Mixing with BFD’ guide first, as many of the techniques described below have already been discussed in detail. 1. First steps Start by setting sensible levels on all channels, in order to achieve the best mixing headroom.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD One technique that often works well is to remove some extreme low-end (up to 60 Hz) from the bass guitar to leave room for the kick to do its thing. If you use EQ to increase bass on the kick, try cutting by the same amount at the same frequency on the bass track. It’s all about defining ‘pockets’ for each sound. You can also try using a sidechain compressor with the bass and kick, to duck the bass when kicks occur.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD Using compression in this type of situation lets you even out any wild fluctuations in levels. If you want to totally level something out, use zero attack and long release. However, flattening dynamics in this way can be detrimental to the mix - only do things like this if it’s absolutely necessary. Removing dynamics totally from a song will make it flat-sounding and fatiguing to listen to.
www.fxpansion.com Mixing with BFD Pay attention to the tone of the reverb. An overly bright, washy reverb will be distracting in the mix, while a reverb with too much low-end energy will risk muddiness. It can be a very good idea to EQ the reverb returns so that you get the impression of space without cluttering up the mix too much. A Delay line is an alternative technique for introducing more space into the mix.
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