Actually recording your drum track is only half the battle. Once they’re in-the-box – or maybe even laid down ontape – the challenge is to take those raw sounds and shape them so they blend into a track. In this instalment, therefore, we’ll be examining the techniques used by mix engineers. Many of these processes can be applied during recording, too, but we’d advise going easy on the compression and limiting and avoiding noise gates altogether until it’s time to start mixing.
Phase Check
Every competent engineer should carry out phase-checking when recording drums, but if you’re mixing drum tracks that were recorded by someone else you should carry out a phase check before making any subsequent balance or equalisation decisions. If you’re mixing ‘in-the-box’, you should be able to find phase-flip functions in your DAW. In Logic, for example, you’ll find a Phase Invert button in the Gain plug-in under Utilities. Just follow the same procedure we outlined in the recording section.
Time Alignment
For those who want to get really picky about phasing, you can try lining up multitracked audio regions. For example, when spaced overhead microphones have been used, the snare sound often reaches one microphone fractionally before it reaches the other. If you zoom in close on the waveforms this is easy to see. In this case, you would simply move the overhead audio regions forward in time to line up with the snare
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