Ol' Skool - what are you using on the drum buss?

[Trailerman]

I have some mix work on at the moment, and wondered what people are using on the drum buss.

Specifically, when you have a drum mix which is mainly programmed, what are you using to smooth off the edges and give it some Ol' Skool, retro character? I'm working in PT HD and getting pretty good results with Culture Vulture across the drums, preceded by some Cranesong Phoenix (Radiant) and followed by SSL-esque bus compression and a touch of analogue EQ. Just feel it could be a fraction "dirtier", and wondered if you guys had some other techniques for roughing things up a bit more.

Thanks in advance

Jules

[soundsubs]

Try these:

1.) sansamp psa-1. awesome on kick/snare (not so good on highhats). dont be afraid to drive it hard but not too hard. also submix it underneath

2.) mic the control room speakers (in stereo) with two closely matched 57's. this worked really really well for me a few times to dirty up a snare. the crappier the mic, the better. condensers dont work too well for some reason.

3.) dont know if you have this, but dirty up (lofi) your reverb if its on your snare. this REALLY helps a snare cut through. if you just pass it through telephone eq its good too.

4.) double the track with the same midi notes but different drum kit, sum to mono. great for choruses and bridges.


hope this helps.

[yeloocproducer]

Massey Tape Head is great to rough up kicks and snares. Also, sounds rediculous, but if you want "lo fi" you could actually use the plugin "lo fi"... just one or two tenths of the saturation or distortion, or take the sample rate down to 33K. This plug-in is still good for that.

You could also run loops through an SP303 with bit reduction in realtime... with a bit of latency. Shift it back. Or use Live's bit reduction plugin. These are really "old school" aggressive sounding. Trashy.

Man, if it still sounds too clean after Pheonix, culture vulture, lofi, tape head and the bit reduction... then I don't know what to tell ya.

[Peter Project]

Or you could do it for real, and just drop the bit rate to 8-12 bits, or sampler rate to 22k.
That'll give it the old school flavour.

[Trailerman]

Yelo, Soundsubs, Peter - thanks so much, great suggestions.

I'm wrapping the mix up today, and then have one more similar track to mix, so this will really help. Don't get me wrong, these are pretty extreme cases, where the nature of the track and the main samples just call out for the drums to be really grungy and old-vinyl sounding.

I'm so glad nobody suggested PSP Vintage Warmer - it doesn't to my ear sound anything like tape saturation, or tubes, or whatever else it's supposed to replicate, but for some reason seems to get used to death on everything, and turn it to mud.

I will try a touch of Sansamp on the snare, and possibly kick. Out of interest, when I try and use Sansamp as a parallel effect I often get phasing issues mixing the processed signal back in with the original - has anybody found a way around this? Maybe I need to mess around with inverting the phase ....?

I'm also going to try some creative use of TL Space with some of the more boxy impulses through a filter and see how that sounds on the snare - kind of like micing up the speakers, but for lazy people with limited time. I'm not using much verb in the drum mix, but I'll see if it can be lo-fi'd a bit more. I'll also give Tape Head a spin (what a great plugin!) although I'm already using it elsewhere in the mix - which reminds me, I really ought to buy the full version.

I'm 90% there already with the Culture Vulture, Phoenix and some Massive Passive, and I've replaced the SSL bus comp with the Thermionics Phoenix, but I want a tad more character without just cranking more distortion out of the Vulture. Incidentally, I've been messing with DUY Tape and McDSP Analogue Channel a bit recently for this kind of thing - both great plugins and good for that 7.5ips, badly setup tape-machine with past-it's-sell-by-date tape sound!

Weird how we spend all this money on great pre's, state of the art converters and work at the highest sample-rates and bit depths we can manage, only to then have to undo it all when we want a sound with some good old-fashioned dirt and character

Thanks again

Jules