so i've just finished my tutorials on
how to record drums in cakewalk by ben
lab and now i'm going to focus on how to
mix now this is a quick mix video
because mixing is a gray area
there are so many different ways of
mixing there's so many different plugins
that you could use but there are some
fundamental plugins that you should use
to make sure that your drums come across
more pronounced
more focused
and more meteor yeah
i definitely believe that you should
have the compression eq
those are the main two things that you
need for drums uh anything else
saturation distortion anything else that
you want to add reverb delay that's up
to you
your discretion
now keep in mind also that this is
listening to a drum beat there's no
other instruments so there's a part
where you mix the drums together to make
them sound good but then you also have
to mix it with your overall project
including your vocals or whatever else
you may add into your song
all right uh i have
everything up here so i'm going to go
ahead and start playing with this bass
drum first
and you may hear a little noise in the
background because my wife is doing
something but it's okay
all right so um we're going to start
with this bass drum
and you can see that i have turned out
the reverb and i've turned out the
compression that come
with si drum kit
because i want to add my own compression
all right
so now you can do it a few different
ways there's a pro channel strip which i
haven't really started talking about and
i really don't want to get into that
right now because there's a lot of
different things that are on here but
i'm just going to work with tinnitus
because that's what most of my videos
are dealing with all right so if i want
to add a fx send or not fx10 but i want
to add effects to it
i can left click
right over here it says show rack menu
plus sign
insert audio effects and let's go down
to dynamics
and let's do a compressor
so the main important thing of a
compressor
is to
level out the sound
so my
parts of the bass drum where i'm peaking
or maybe i'm hitting harder
and then there's some parts where i may
be hitting softer
i kind of want to bring them to an even
level so that way they sit more
like comfortably in the mix because you
don't want to have like you know
imagine if you was listening to the beat
in the bass drum goes
cut
you know if it was like up and down like
that dynamically uh it would be very
awkward in the mix so you want to make
sure that it's hitting
you know a certain way even when the
softer notes are played
dynamically you still hear them so they
cut through the mix and that's what it's
all about that's what compression
actually helps with doing is being able
to cut through the mix
all right so i have this compression
pulled up and once i pull it up i can
kind of figure out exactly what i want
to do with it
but if you're not sure of how to really
mess with this it's okay to use a preset
nobody's going to judge you for it
so the presets are here
you can add a preset updated preset a
preset manager
uh so i'm going to go into and if i'm
looking for
if i'm
if i'm looking for
the kick drum excuse me i'm having a
long night
i can click on kick drum and it will set
it for me and it has the threshold and
negative 14 decibels
the ratios are 7.5 to 1.
all right
and you can kind of think of it like
this i started at 0 and i'm down to
negative 14s this is how much i actually
reduced it by
if for some reason that you find out
that the bass drum is cool but it's not
loud enough now
well that's okay because keep in mind
you still have to deal with the eq as
well and you might want to add some
extra plug in so leave yourself some
wiggle room
and if it's not loud enough
you could always turn up the gain right
here on the side
and you want to try to keep it from
clipping at all
so like i said you still got to add some
extra plugins maybe
all right
sounds cool
i'm good with that now i can go to my eq
and i'm gonna use
the same eq the sonitus equalizer
and there's also presets in here
and then if i want to just get a little
bass boost i can do that
okay but i'm going to reset it because
what i really want to do
is first of all i want to roll off the
lower end you're going to hear me say
this on every single type of eq that i
do i don't care what kind of instrument
it is
unless it's a sub instrument like a sub
bass or something like that 808 i might
keep those lower frequencies in
everything that's below 60 hertz
i wouldn't really worry about it but you
can play with it and figure out exactly
what you want it to sound like first
thing i'm going to do is go to band 1
and i'm going to change this to a high
pass filter high pass meaning that i'm
allowing the highs to come through or
pass through
which means i am dipping some of the
lows
this is what happens when you take too
much away
so you want to kind of listen to it
until you hear a difference
and then you know you took away too much
so bring it back in
okay bring it back in until you hear the
bottom back in there but
even though it doesn't really seem like
it's making a difference you're lowering
this frequency range right here it just
opens up so much room every instrument
has this range of frequencies that you
want to make sure that you honor
all right so here's the bass drum again
i'll put this on loop because i i'm
going to keep stopping and doing this
thing again i don't need to keep doing
it but so what i'm doing now is
i've got that rolled off i'm good all
right i'm not gonna worry about the
highs i'm not gonna worry about the mids
but i am gonna do a dip in my low mid
and this frequency range tends to be
around
400
to 500 hertz
all right don't ask me why but it's just
this is one of the frequencies that i
know always bothers me
so what i want to do is i want to do a q
all right so i have the q i'm going to
adjust to 14.6
that's going to allow me to get a really
really sharp q
and then i'm going to boost it until i
find a frequency that i really don't
want
so about right there
right just a small cut
that's fine
all right now that i have that right
there i can go ahead
and
mess around with the bottom end because
you know it's all about the bottom we
want the bottom in the bass drum
all right let's do
um and i don't want to do that type of
boost but i want to
do
deal with two
all right
and then i can
change this but i have to adjust the
queue
just to cue so you can just
gradually move
this one
okay now keep in mind that you do want
the bottom end but be careful of putting
too much bottom in into a drum i'm
listening to it with these um audio
technica headphones
and i know that these headphones have a
lot more highs and mids in them they
they're they're not um
they're not savvy when it comes to the
bass den
so i like to overcompensate for it by
adding more bass and then when i get to
my mix in the car
then i'm having a problem because now
all of a sudden it's real boomy
so but i am going to boost it some and
let's keep it um just to cue a little
bit
all right
now if i want to add more click
and get more resonance out of the bass
drum i can do this
change that
if i want it more darker i can do that
i think i'm fine with that right now
[Music]
all right i turned my compression off
i forgot to name my compressor on
there we go i think it's on now
[Music]
yeah there we go
[Music]
all right
got that now on my snare what i did
quickly going through this i just eq i
rolled off again
on my lower end and i boosted the highs
ever so slightly and dipped in the
mirrors just a tiny bit but not a sharp
q more of a
wider range
and then i add a reverb
just a simple reverb
put a little width on there a little
early reflection which is what the er
means
and reverb and then
this is what it sounds like with the
reverb on
[Music]
okay
it's very short not real long
[Music]
all right let me add the other snare
drum in
add a little reverb on that same reverb
i just copied it press ctrl and send it
over
[Music]
now this symbol let's talk about this
symbol real quick
now normally i would go through and i
probably would separate put this right
this this bail ride on a different track
but for now just kept it together so the
crash and the ride are on the same thing
uh i don't really care for panning this
but if you want to keep yours straight
that's fine if you want to pan it
that's okay
i can come in here and turn the volume
down
or i can tune it up
[Music]
turn this down some
[Music]
this crash i might want to
put that up some
[Music]
i want to lower it
pitch wise
[Music]
i'm gonna have some impression on two as
well
[Music]
yeah yeah yeah okay
all right
if i'm cool with that i can go and add
some eq to this if i need to
i might add a little eq
[Music]
probably do just like a little
brightness more a little brightness
[Music]
travel boost
[Music]
all right
and i might be happy with that and that
might be all that i need to do
[Music]
now normally i wouldn't have the mains
this loud i'm just bringing it up so you
all can hear it a little better
[Music]
now another thing that i can actually do
is
what's called a multi-band
compression
and to do this i would bring up
first of all let's do this let's bring
up my console view
and i would actually take
all of these drums and i would send them
to a bus
right over here
so i'm gonna create a new bus
new stereo bus
i can go through labeling it but for
right now for the second tutorial i am
just gonna keep it as bus d all right so
i'm gonna take all of these drums and
now they're to be going over to this bus
so how do i change that i go down to
master
uh the output right now set to
uh the output right now set to master
but now i'm going to change it to bus d
go through bus d for all of these
looking at my mixer for a second
i had turned off my gate
i had my gate off so i know you probably
heard an extra noise in the background
because the washer and dryer are going
so this is what happens when you live in
apartment
and you hear noise everywhere
but sorry about that i'm using actually
a different mic too as well this is a
i normally use my um mxl condenser mic
but this is actually a little cheap
behringer mic
um i bought these it was like three
microphones for thirty dollars or
something like the twenty dollar twenty
nine dollars or something like that
it sounds pretty good and sometimes i
use it at performances um it does have
more
high in higher end clarity so but most
barringer products have a lot of clarity
so you might have to add some bottom to
it but it does sound really good i don't
know how it sounds when it's recording
but it sounds really good and i've been
using it for like the last two or three
videos so
i'm still going to switch back to my
omnidirectional but just a little piece
about that all right back to this
all right so i'm here and
i'm going to keep going on bus d bus d
plus d
plus d output
plus d output plus d
all right and now everything is going
here
and if i play it
you can notice that
i can control
all of the instruments here
all the drums here this comes in handy
when you need to just turn down
all the drums at one time
[Music]
all right
okay so now this
multi-band and compressor it works
really well and this is actually one of
the tools that you use when you're
trying to pre-master
your audio and getting ready to send it
out to distrokid and other
platforms for distribution
so um go to
dynamics tonight nice multi-band
right and what this allows you to do is
it has different zones
so it's like a whole frequency range so
like if i wanted to solo just the low
end i can do so
which i can do now
[Music]
and if i want to just solo
okay
i don't know if you can hear that well
or not but that's our little sub low end
and you can tell that mainly the only
thing that's down there is the bass drum
now if i had a bass guitar or maybe a
acoustic i mean not acoustic guitar but
some type of guitar or maybe a keyboard
that's in that lower
range then you probably would hear that
as well but right now the thing you hear
is bass drum
okay this is more of the click of the
bass drum
and you hit the snare
okay and this is more the brighter end
of that
and now you can tell now that you hear
way less of the bass drum
you just really hear like a like a tap
but you hear the snare drum
and then at the very top
you can
you know
anything at all so this is how you can
play around with it and then you can
there's presets in this
you can do like a default compression
you can do like a vintage mode
smooth
or i can do a
[Music]
vintage hard
[Music]
okay if i didn't like that i can play
around some more do soft
[Music]
i can do normal hard
i can set it default
i'm going to boost this level
[Music]
okay
you can adjust the attack you can just
the release of it
so you can get in here and play with
this and get a sound that's that's
really good
and this is like what allows it to be
more
focused compressed
because yeah the individual compressions
they were good but once you put this on
there it's like the sweetener of the
deal
[Music]
all right
okay now if you're using drums like this
you got to tweak it you know now if
you're using samples and you bring in
samples from like splice or other you
know other platforms or whatever
a lot of time that stuff is already
compressed it's already eq it's already
mixed so it sounds good out the box
but i advise you if you want to do that
do it but if not and you want to use
strictly the sounds that are within
cakewalk you got to get in here but you
got to put some work into it because
they might not sound perfect right out
the back you got to like really tweak
them to make them sound fat full
and tease them out all right you all
this is just a quick tutorial
i hope this helps you know if you like
it definitely give it a thumbs up
and
if you have comments negative or
positive definitely put them in the
description
if you have comments definitely negative
if you have comments
negative or positive definitely put them
in the comments section below if you
want to know more about recording drums
in cakewalk definitely check out my
playlist that shows eight ways how to
record drums within cakewalk by band lab
love you all adios