DHF Superior Drum Mixing

[brandondrury]

I think this is more of an issue of mixing philosophy than anything, but I'm curious as to how much "mixing" you guys are doing to the DHF Superior drums. I realize the correct answer here is "as much as it needs", but that won't exactly help me in this case.

Today was the first day I was able to play with DFH Superior after finishing "live sound hell week". It appears that the drums are VERY natural. This sound certainly has it's place, but to my ears they may be a little bit too natural for many projects I'll be doing.

Just for the hell of it, I borrowed the latest Nickelback, Keith Urban, and some country chicks called "The Wreckers" cds just to really hear what the masses are used to hearing in their drums these days. The Kieth Urban drums were very natural and I think I could hit that without too much crazy mixing using DFH Superior. The Wreckers sounded like it would need a little mixing trickery if I was using DHF Superior. The Nickelback cd had drum sound that would take lots of compression and lots of tweaking if I was uing DFH.

I've always wondered if I "overmix" when I track drums. I usually try to force the drums into something that they usually are not. Sometimes this comes out okay. Sometimes I fall on my face. After hearing so many "natural" sounding drums in DHF, there is a strong possibility that I may have been ruining my tracks just to force the drums to be something they are not with EQ, compression, reverb, and a zillion other tricks. I may have been better off leaving the drums sounding a lot more natural.

Typically, when you render down your DHF drums to seperate tracks, do you have to do as much mixing as you would with a real drummer and microphones?

Brandon

[dach]

depends... i usually eq and compress drums on the way in and I'm not going for so much natural as what the track is looking for.... the advantage of DFHS & C&V is you can tailor the kit, the tuning and the bleed so there doesn't have to be an extreme amount of eq to come close to even fitting the situation.

This week as far as drums go and it's only Tuesday, I worked on some kids stuff (real tight sounding drums), mixed some pop (processed heavily) and some world music (somewhat natural but with a lot of thinning, ambience, etc)... there are several things in those drums that just don't work for every kind of music, namely the OH placement & distance, but it's one of the best purchases I have ever made and almost perfect for what I do.

I guess I don't have a general mixing philosophy when using these... I do for different styles of music but not for just using them... if that makes sense... You get what you get when you bounce... it's up to you to make them work after that....

Have you actually rendered anything yet? It does sound quite different (real) once you do....

[brandondrury]

No rendering yet. I'm still learning what each snare sounds like, adjusting velocities from songs I've been working on, and getting an overall feel for the program. It's clearly very powerful. I'm not sure if it will fit every situation everytime, but it certainly knocks out 90% of real sounding acoustic drums for $260. Not bad!

I'm still trying to get all mapping and such set up. Right now workflow is a total mess, but that's to be expected with a brand new sequencer and a brand new drum sample system. As long as I can commit to a sound in DHF Superior fairly quickly, the program will certainly speed up the way I work.

Just for the hell of it, I'll go ahead and try rendering something down just to see how it turns out. My RAM went to my buddy's house (business address) so I still limping by on 1GB. Hopefully, I'll have that by tomorrow.

I fired up one of the demos that came with the cd. It was the "metal" tune. On the website it was an mp3 with guitars and bass. On the install cd it was just a midi file for the drums and a DHF file to bring up the preset kit. On the mp3 demo, I thought the track was sounding pretty damn good. The guitars were perfect for the genre on the mp3. Obviously, a pro recording. However, when I fired up just the drums with the midi track, the drums weren't near as "metal" as I had orginally thought. I'm not sure if this because they added EQ, compression, etc to the mp3 demo on the site of if the drums just really sounded that "vintagy". I'll do a comparison later on. I may learn something.

Brandon