In the article we discuss several essential live drum production techniques that drum virtual instrument workflows generally don't inspire. If you produce drums predominantly with software drum libraries and find you struggle when recording and mixing live multi-track drums this article aims to help you. Read this article to broaden your understanding of key skills used in live drum production and how to apply them when producing a song using MIDI-based drum applications.
Around the turn of the Millenium came the rise of software drum instruments which provided both the flexibility of working with drum samples and a means of producing realistic sounding live drum performances in the box using MIDI. Sound Loops and FXpansion's BFD both come to mind. BFD was one of the first drum VIs to include immensely detailed velocity layers across each kit piece, flexible routing and a healthy library of acoustic kits and cymbals that all sounded great out of the box, though you needed a powerful computer to run BFD it in its full-fat mode.
Looking back, Sound Loops and BFD set the mould for future software drum libraries, however, it doesn’t seems to matter how good drum libraries are these days there are some aspects of in-the-box drum software that can give an impression that the art of recording and mixing live drums is easier than it looks. You may struggle to learn and develop following four skills crucial in live drum production if you work predominantly with drum VIs.
You May Struggle To Develop Skills To Help You Make Important Creative Choices Quickly
Commitment plays a vital role in recording and mixing, especially when live multi-track drum production is concerned. Plug-ins and virtual instruments often leave too many creative options open which can complicate a production process. Just because you can change a snare drum sample 15 times throughout a production doesn't mean you should. We would discourage a drummer switching between 15 different snares, why should software drums be different?
In the context of live band recording, engineers and producers commit many important decisions before even hitting record. Kit piece selection, tuning, microphone choice and positioning being the key areas they establish. Most of these essential aspects of drum production are indeed variable in drum software but can be distracting if overused.
If you find yourself constantly searching for suitable samples or sounds in drum software you may be suffering from choice paralysis, which is relatively easy to remedy. Try approaching your drum parts as though you were about to track a live kit. This will hopefully help you feel more confident in your choices. There's another bonus working this way. By committing to your drum choices early you give your creativity freedom to focus on the fuller picture of production.
You May Never Learn To Appreciate A Drummer’s Real Feel And What Human Groove Adds To Music
Live drummers are not machines that play dead on every small beat division like sequenced MIDI parts can. Little timing imperfections in live drum performances are part of what gives acoustic-based music a human feel which makes for a great vibe.
Most modern drum software offers some form of humanize function for dialling in some organic looseness into MIDI grooves. DAWs also have swing and humanize features which are both well worth experimenting with. Sadly, many inexperienced producers ignore these fuctions opting instead for quantising every hit hard to the grid. If your goal was to produce drum parts with a live drummer feel quantising hard isn't the solution.
Skilled drummers usually have a unique ability to ever so slightly push and pull the tempo of a song. These small changes, which are often only one or two bpm at a time, can help give certain aspects of a song's structure impact. To hear this for yourself, listen to Led Zepplins "Since I've Been Loving You". This song is a great example of using tempo as tool. Listen how drummer John Bonham kept the groove slow and lazy in the softer sections ramping the speed ever so slightly up in the more energetic verses towards the end.
Using tempo as a tool is well worth experiment with when producing with drum VIs along with humanize tools especially if you feel your drum parts feel overly rigid in style.
You May Never Learn Skills For Mixing Unprocessed Live Drums
Sought after drum kits sampled in beautiful sounding live rooms with expensive gear by industry-leading engineers is one of many significant selling points of drum software. Think of any well-known studio and there is a strong chance a drum VI package was recorded there. Choice then is plentiful except in one key area which we all know makes a massive impact in recording live acoustic sources, spot microphone placement. The tone of kick or snare drum can change drastically with a few minor tweaks to a spot mic’s position. Learning the skills for knowing how these positions and distances impact the results of live drum recordings takes lots of practise to master which you simply can not develop in drum VI production.
Drum VI kit pieces, such as snare and kicks in particular, often sound polished as the studios used for sampling may have used the best mics, outboard and consoles to shape the sound of the drums at the front end of tracking. Great sounding kits are indeed helpful if you need to get a drum VI part working quickly in a mix. A big downside to working routinely with polished sounding drum VIs is that your ears and perception of drum sounds can get spoilt fast. You may also not learn, or forget altogether, what unprocessed drums generally sound like.
Many software drums do at least provide a function which can enable us to set the distance of ambient microphones from the virtual kit which is handy if you are after a specific thunderous sound but that's about as far as microphone choices go in most software of this type.
You May Never Understand What Drum Bleed Sounds Like And How To Address It In A Drum Mix
You will certainly encounter spill when working with recorded multi-track drums. Also known as bleed, spill in drum recordings is sound of other drums bleeding through into nearby microphones. For instance, spill can be the sound from the kick drum being picked up by the snare mic. Opinions are divided on what to do about bleed in drum mixes. Some choose to embrace it as they favour the sound of off-axis sound blended in with spot and ambient microphones. Others, prefer a more clinical approach reducing or even removing bleed altogether.
Most modern big name drum VIs include some form of faux bleed usually found in key kit pieces such as off-axis kick sound spilling into the snare top channel and vice versa. While this helps add another layer of realism to VI drums in many cases it doesn’t sound believable enough. What’s worse, spill isn’t usually across all the kit pieces as you would expect in live multi-track drum recordings.
The strongest suggestion we make on this topic is try to not assume you know how to mix live acoustic drums if you have only ever mixed drum VIs. The differences between the two in terms of bleed alone are massive. For instance, sweetening a snare drum channel in a VI is often very simple and precise. Performing the same move on a live snare channel is a totally different animal often because of bleed. By sweetening a live snare channel you may also end up brightening the tone of the hi-hats and cymbals within the fuller picture of the drum mix.
In Summary
This article is not intended to put live drum recording up against drum software workflows. Both have their place in music production. Our goal was to highlight a number of areas in which drum software workflows could inhibit you developing skills and key workflows for live drum production.