Hi Ross,
Thank you for your time and wisdom, this is awesome.
I read the SOS article about you and Van Halen's Different Kind of Truth last year and was interested in how you treated Alex's drums with varying levels of and different compressors in parallel.
From memory, I believe you mentioned SSL G, Distressor in Nuke, Fatso and Chandler, too. Could you expand some more on this and your thought process about how you created that massive drum sound. I assume you treated different instruments, or groups, in the kit with a specific compressor and summed them all together for the final sounds.
Lastly, I remember you also mentioning you still use the RMX16 for snare, which I assume is a don't fix what isn't broken mindset.
Thanks again, this and interviews such as the couple you did on Pensado's is invaluable for myself and the community.

You rock \m/

Brian Marshak

Hey Brian !!

I tend to approach drum mixing similarly whether its Van Halen or any other record depending on how much information the drums need to compete with
some of my go to approaches are multing or duplicating the kik and snare so there is a duplicate kik and snare
then I process the duplicated kik and snare to taste with an possibly a gate then an api 560 eq into a distressor
this allows me to have a gated compressed kik and snare to add to the dry kik and snare for punch and crack
I will often mult the O/H and compress and eq these for whatever ever I am looking for added to the dry cymbals
Rooms can make your kit sound huge if they are recorded correctly and then compressed heavily after the recording
If you squash your room to heavily in the recording you cant get it back later
but in a mix compressed room are great to make drums sound huge
The Chandler Emi, Distressors,Fatso,SSL, Neve 33609, Fairchilds and 1176's work great for this
then
I will usually have an overall drum buss mult and crush
this takes parts of the whole kit and I compress and eq this to taste to bring the whole kit into a glue factor or punch and glue
my faves for this are the Overstayer / Compex/SSL / Smart/
The Overstayer has become one of my very favorite crushing compressors
It's amazing
so
even tho the question was targeted to Van Halen
I do this or pieces of this on every mix to taste
and yes
the RMX 16 is my absolute fave reverb for drums along with the eventide 2016 and now the Bricasti but
I do not usually use anything but the RMX on drums because I dont like reverb on drums .. i like well crushed overheads and rooms ... reverb just tends to blur except for the RMX

thank you very much, Ross !!

Hi Ross,

Are you referring to the old, 1/2-space FET comp that Overstayer made, or one of their newer gadgets?

Thanks

Ross I would love to know what patches from the RMX 2016 and Bricasti you like.

Thanks for sharing all this great info ! Just for clarification for your dry Kick and Snare channel , do you just eq that track or leave it totally dry(no eq or comp) and just blend in with your eq'd compressed gated Drum mult ?

the dry kik and snare are just eq'd and not compressed
and on separate channels than the multed kik and sn
then the whole kit .. the separate tracks of rooms and over heads and
mults and all ...
goes to the drum buss so I end up with a dry drum buss that has no compression and possibly then 2 other drum busses that have different compressors on them
and possibly a slightly different blend depending on how much and what I want in the overall drum compression mults

Hi,
Which overstayer? I've been using the vca that has a distortion blend..
I was just wondering if you were using the saturator or something else.
Thanks

I am using the half space old FET, the MAS and the Saturator in differing things