Drums are the subject that get a lot of people off-track when they start making & mixing music.
Drums maketh not the Mix
The song is about the song. Tautological I know but it needs to keep being said when I hear track after track where all the care in the world went into the drums & bass but barely a thought went into creating a narrative, or story, with melody or even a careful flow of sound.
This series of videos takes you through the elements that make up each style of drum sound so you can learn to roll your own sounds instead of relying on pre-made samples. You can still use sample is f you like but you will not be quite as trapped s you were before as you can know what parts you need to create the sound your song needs.
The YouTube Playlist: Making Drum Sounds/Samples
Kick Drums
Snare Drums
High-Hats
Toms, Bongos & Percussion
Understanding Groove
Mixing and the Drum Bus
Each video is long, and together they may be about 6 hours. But I am confident that if you really work through all the thinking in here, in a few months you will be so much happier with how your drums are working in your mixes.
This course is available free. However a lot of time & commitment goes into making these for you. I do hope that you choose to repay some of that with one or all of these options:
- Write a Comment where you detail how this material has helped you. Sharing that is even better.
- Purchase one of my $5 albums over on Bandcamp (if you don’t dig my music, give it to your Dentist for Xmas).
The track fragment in the final video got worked up into a short piece and so became part of a whole mix. You may notice the mix so far sounds different. Well done. I dind’t actually change anything much in the mix at all. It was just that when I got to the Mastering stage I felt I needed a rather different sonic footprint as it all seemed rather “middy”. Enter my Space Tone VST which has a wonderful way to brutalize a sonic profile and in no time I had a profile that was better overall.
