@Tom- I'm forever cranking up highs on snares to get them to cut through mixes. As I mentioned in the blog, I always start with something that sounds good soloed, but by the time I have the entire mix put together, I find myself cranking the highs like mad (and it usually sounds pretty funky when you solo it).
BTW, I'm pretty sure the clicky Metallica kick isn't even a real kick. I think he was triggering a sample (as a lot of metal bands of that era did).
@Mike D- re signature sounds, I agree. It's a fine line, because you don't want to box yourself in to the point where everything sounds the same. But with the vast array of sounds and samples available today, it's easy to drown in it. When I did my record a couple years back, outside of live drums on a couple songs, I used standard vintage Linn Drum samples for almost everything. When you hear them dry and unprocessed, they're pretty underwhelming by today's standards. But if you do all processing I talk about in the post, you can make them sound great… and believe me, those Linn samples became a key component of my sound. But the important thing isn't so much those particular samples, it's that I chose one thing and chose to exploit it.
@Sam- Thanks! Here are some drum humanizing tricks:
- I have a bit of a nasty habit of overquantizing things, but if I want the feel of my drum parts to be more "real", I set quantize strength to around 70% (this varies depending on how good you are at finger drumming and how complex the part is). It's in the quantize menu in the MIDI piano roll editor window:
- Use a drum sample set with multiple variations of each hit and alternate them randomly.
- Vary velocities slightly- for example, make the kicks hit a little harder on the one.
- I mentioned this one in the blog, but it's a biggie for me… delete the high-hat notes when fills are happening. I'll often "air drum" to figure out exactly which high hat notes to cut.
- Not sure this qualifies as a "humanizing" trick, but I often pump up the volume of snare or tom fills with automation (listen to Roy Thomas Baker's productions on early Cars records for plenty of borderline ridiculous examples of this).
- Again, not sure if this qualifies, and I sort of mentioned it in the blog, but I like to send all drums (except kick) from a kit into the same main snare reverb send channel to varying degrees. Most reverb on the snare (of course), a little less on toms, and the least on cymbals, but this still has the effect of combining the kit in the same "space'.
- If the kit still isn't congealed enough, sometimes I make a send channel with smallish room "personality" reverb followed by a compressor set to really crush things, then send all drums in the kit to that. Now mix it in to taste with the normal kit.
