Drums are mixed in a fixed order of importance: get the kick and snare right, fit the bass around the kick, then place everything else. Most weak drum mixes are not a plugin problem — they are a problem of two elements competing for the same 40 Hz of low end.
The frequency map:
| Range | What lives there |
|---|
| 40–60 Hz | Sub weight, felt more than heard |
| 60–100 Hz | Fundamental punch |
| 100–200 Hz | Body and warmth |
| 300–600 Hz | Boxiness — usually cut 2–4 dB |
| 2–5 kHz | Beater click and definition |
High-pass below 30 Hz to remove inaudible energy that eats headroom. Then choose a lane: a 60 Hz-centred kick suits hip-hop and trap, a 90–100 Hz-centred kick cuts through on laptops and in rock.
Compression on the kick should be gentle — ratio 4:1, attack 10–30 ms so the transient passes through untouched, release fast enough to recover before the next hit, 2–4 dB of gain reduction. A fast attack on a kick kills the click, which is the opposite of what most people want.
The fundamental usually sits between 150 and 250 Hz, the crack between 2 and 5 kHz, and the snare-wire sizzle above 8 kHz. Cut 400–600 Hz if it sounds cardboard-like.
Snare benefits more from compression than the kick does: ratio 4:1, attack 10–20 ms, release around 100 ms, 4–6 dB of gain reduction, which lets the tail bloom and makes the drum sound bigger.
Reverb on the snare is where the drum kit gains size. A 0.8–1.4 s plate or room with 15–30 ms pre-delay, high-passed at 300 Hz, is the standard.
High-pass at 300–500 Hz without hesitation. There is nothing useful below that on a hi-hat, and the accumulated low-mid energy from open hats and cymbals is a common source of mix clutter.
Hats mostly need level and pan, not processing. If they sound harsh, a narrow cut around 6–8 kHz usually fixes it. Keep them a few dB quieter than feels right when soloed — hats sound loud in isolation and disappear in context far less than you expect.
Room mics are the fastest route to a kit sounding like one instrument rather than four samples. Compress them hard — ratio 8:1 or higher, fast attack, 8–15 dB of gain reduction — and blend underneath. On programmed drums, a short room reverb on a send fed by kick, snare and percussion does the same job.
A transient designer is often better than a compressor for programmed drums, because it works on the envelope rather than on level.
- More attack on a soft kick or snare makes it cut through without raising its overall level.
- Less sustain on a boomy kick tightens the low end more cleanly than an EQ cut.
- More sustain on a dry sampled snare adds body without reverb wash.
Send the whole kit to a parallel bus. On that bus: ratio 10:1 or higher, attack around 1–10 ms, release fast (30–100 ms), 10–20 dB of gain reduction. Then blend it in underneath the dry kit until the drums feel bigger, usually at a level where muting the parallel bus makes the kit sound noticeably smaller but you cannot pick the bus out.
Because the dry kit is untouched, you keep the transients and gain the body. This is why the technique is called New York compression.
This is the decision that makes or breaks the low end.
- Find the kick fundamental. Use a spectrum analyser, or sweep a narrow boost until the weight peaks.
- Put the bass somewhere else. If the kick peaks at 60 Hz, aim the bass energy at 90–110 Hz, and cut a 2–3 dB notch in the bass at 60 Hz.
- Add dynamic separation. Sidechain the bass from the kick with 3–6 dB of ducking, or duck only the sub band with a dynamic EQ.
- Check in mono, on a small speaker. If the kick disappears, you have a phase or masking problem, not a level problem.
Related reading: drum patterns explained, sidechain compression explained, and mixing bass.
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