Transient Designer creativity on drums for a more natural, but beefy sound

[Methlab]

I am not sure if this is a common practice, but I have been experimenting with transient design on mults.

I copy the kick and snare tracks and put a TDesigner on each channel. For the first one, I suck out the attack and just leave the reverb of the drum in the channel.

For the second, I keep the attack and the body with no reverb. I then send them both to a Kick and Snare bus where I Compress them a bit and EQ. I just started this so of course it always sounds good when you first do something new. I was wondering if you guys do stuff like this..the goal here for me is to get a nice drum sound that punches, yet still sounds roomy and natural. I am not into the modern rock sampled sound, and more into the indie rock sound that punches in a mix more naturally (no huge mesa boogies to cut through..etc).

After this, I do parallel compress and distort, then send the entire kit to a main bus where I compress a little more to taste.

I am wondering how a lot of the mixers working on indie rock are getting their drum sounds so I am trying as many different techniques as I can. I'd love to hear yours, especially if you are into bands like Grizzly Bear, Royal Bangs, Surfer Blood, Twin Tigers...etc..

[steelyfan]

For some stuff, I'll send the kick and snare out seperately to two guitar amps and mic those. Sometimes I'll send the overhead with snare.
But on the way to the guitar amps, they hit a stomp pedal compressor (mxr super compressor kills for this) and maybe some effects pedals.

Moving the mics back can bring in more room sound. Anyhow, that's where I stop processing. By the time I'm micing the amp with effects and moving mics, THAT'S the sound, one simple reamp. I try to keep it to minimal steps.


BTW---- can you please upload your FIRST avatar? jeezzzzz.....


steelyfan

[dangoudie]

I'd be very interested to hear some samples of the TD idea. I have often tried to separate sounds by frequency or time but they usually end up missing something in the crossover region so I'd love to hear if you got something working well.

I often copy the snare track a couple of times and make one all meat and one all beef and mix it in with the raw track but it never worked individually and that is frequency based rather than temporally based.

As an aside, I demoed the SPL TD plug and noticed dropping all the sustain portion acted as a pretty good transparent gate.