Now that the mix bus is in place, Jacquire turns his attention to the rhythm section to get the perfect tone and balance between the bass guitar and drums.
See how Jacquire King:
Explains his approach to adding ambience to a drum kit
Cleans up the Tom EQ
Breaks down his Kick/Snare parallel path with a Neve 33609 and Decapitator
Explains his Kick/Snare/Bass parallel path, setup with a Fairchild 660
Dials in his Drum Crush parallel path using the Devil-Loc
Watch Jacquire King, mix "Keep The Light On" from Oak & Ash. Only on pureMix.net
00:00:37 I'm gonna send to the drum reverb
from our discrete snare sample.
00:00:42 Snare drum track mic.
00:00:44 But I'm just gonna use this initially to
kind of set up
how I want the drum sound.
00:00:48 The Chamber was sounding a little
too bright and open.
00:00:51 I'm gonna go for a room sound.
00:01:29 I'm just adding a little bit of extra
ambiance around the snare drum,
it kind of helps make the drum-kit
feel a little bit more whole.
00:01:35 Specially because the mic is
the snare is miked so closely
and it's so present and loud
and I tend to try to focus room mics
more on the darker ambiance of the space
to get away from the cymbals
and really
create the size and warmth
around the kick drum.
00:01:52 I mean, the snare drum is certainly
happening in there
but based on where I
tend to wanna place the microphones
slightly prioritized to the kick
and away from the cymbals.
00:02:05 So, adding a little bit of ambiance
to the snare this way
helps bring it back in and
tight it into the whole picture.
00:02:13 I'm gonna also turn up some on the toms.
00:02:16 So, I think a good place to sort of
check that out will be in the intro.
00:02:42 It feels like enough.
00:02:43 I'll check it on this Chorus part.
00:02:52 The toms feel,
I like the sound we have,
I'm just gonna tighten them up a
little bit with a little EQ.
00:04:08 There's a little bit of ringing on the
rack tom that I was trying to minimize.
00:04:12 Hear them with and without the EQ.
00:04:25 Just tightening them up,
bringing the life a little bit.
00:04:28 It feels like I've got a pretty
good amount of reverb there.
00:04:46 There's my center overhead.
00:04:49 A lot of snare focus here,
kind of a whole drum-kit sound.
00:04:52 I'm feeling like I wanna fat
the snare up a little bit there
and kind of take out some
that mid-range cloudiness.
00:05:43 It just cleans it up a little bit,
gets rid of some of the
subsonic frequencies on it.
00:05:47 I feel like I can turn it
up a little bit more now.
00:05:50 It's sort of helping do what the room mics
and some of the other
stuff has been doing,
like tom leakage
has been doing for the kick drum,
this is kind of helping
round out the snare drum sound
and it's mono so I'm keeping it
in the middle.
00:06:01 The SF 24,
the stereo ribbon is
a little bit more about
the spread of the drums and the cymbals.
00:06:07 So now I'm gonna do a little
bit of EQ to that
to further take it in that direction.
00:06:12 I got remember that, when I bring these up,
that they're not defaulted to
'Natural Phase'.
00:07:11 I primarily like the sound
of a mono overhead.
00:07:15 As you can see, that's what I have
as the louder focus,
which is about the snare drum
kind of keeping
the overall drum sound sort
of focused to the middle.
00:07:25 The stereo ribbon
is giving me a stereo image
but it's really about a nice sort of
cymbal wash and spread.
00:07:34 And just more EQ to kind of like
clarify things and
accentuate
what it is the purpose
that it's there for.
00:07:42 OK. So, with the hi-hat
always wanna to get rid of
as much low-end on the hi-hat as possible.
00:07:58 I barely have it balanced in here
but I'll turn it on and
off and it just helps
clarify and pinpoint where the hi-hat is.
00:08:25 And you can hear, when I engage
this hi-pass filter, on the snare drum,
the snare drum kind of,
I feel a little bit of low-frequency
kind of hanging out
with the snare over on the right side,
where the hi-hat is panned.
00:08:37 As soon as I
throw this hi-pass filter in
you can hear the snare drum become
a little bit crisper and more
articulate right in the middle.
00:08:59 Let's get some of this
parallel stuff happening.
00:09:02 I feel fine with where
the Dr. Sample and the Mono Room
are right now,
I don't really feel like I need
to do much EQ with them at the moment.
00:09:09 I wanna start activating
these parallel buses.
00:09:12 There is the kick and snare bus.
00:09:15 Sometimes I include the samples,
for right now I'm just gonna put the
actual recorded close mics in there.
00:09:22 I'm doing at full volume.
00:09:29 That shows up over here
on the kick snare parallel bus.
00:09:33 I'm using a 33609 on it.
00:09:34 I have a Decapitator after it
just because sometimes I
just want a little bit more grit
and punch on that parallel path.
00:09:41 We'll turn it on just to see,
I'm just gonna turn this on and off.
00:09:44 You can hear the increased level and punch
of the kick and snare
and the focus of that.
00:09:49 And then we'll start to talk
about how the compressor is set.
00:10:18 It's got a very fast release
so the recovery time is not
holding the sound down too much.
00:10:24 It's a fairly fast attack
3:1 ratio
and I have the threshold all the way down.
00:10:29 I wanna kind of get as
much compression out of this
as I can to blend in.
00:10:33 You know,
you might notice that where I've got
sort of these default balances
I just sort of over time have
gravitated towards
blending it in
at this volume of -15.
00:10:44 Now,
I typically leave the return volume there.
00:10:49 Unless I feel like I need to send
more level to get more compression
from the way I have it set
because I can't change the threshold,
I can't lower it anymore.
00:10:57 If I wanted more
compression I'd have to send
more level from the sends
and then probably turn this down.
00:11:05 This is just like a good
average place to start.
00:11:07 It's feeling pretty good.
00:11:09 Let's just turn up the send a little bit
and see what a little bit
more compression sounds like.
00:11:52 I kind of like it where it was.
00:11:53 Another parallel path is the kick,
snare and bass bus, which I guess,
somehow I already had
the snare drum going there...
00:12:02 ...to quite send as much bass level there.
00:12:05 But let's listen to it.
And that's gonna be going through
a Fairchild 660.
00:12:21 The time constant number
3 has a pretty fast attack,
almost a 2 second release.
00:12:26 It's a little program dependent.
00:12:27 The 660s actually weren't stereo,
the 670 is the stereo model,
the 660 is the mono model.
00:12:34 They sound slightly different
because of some of this
circuitry not having it be a stereo unit
it just has a slightly different sound.
00:12:44 I kind of prefer it over the 670
in this particular case.
00:12:47 I see I've got the threshold
nearly all the way up,
which in this case,
this is lowering the threshold,
you're getting more compression this way
as opposed to raising it
to a higher point.
00:13:01 Let me show you
where it is, turning it on and off.
00:13:20 The kick, snare and bass,
they do get louder,
so I can turn this result down
a little bit.
00:13:25 But you can hear how the
relationship between them
becomes a little bit more glued together.
00:13:55 Putting that in there, the relationship
between the bass and the drums,
the bass got a little too hot
in relationship so I turned
the send down there.
00:14:06 The last option we have
is the Drum Crush Bus.
00:14:09 Now, it's already on the toms,
that was unintentional
but sometimes I'll put it on
the overheads or the monos.
00:14:20 Wait...
00:14:22 That's weird,
they say they're not...
00:14:29 that must be a Pro Tools glitch.
00:14:33 They say there's no level
but the faders are up.
00:14:38 So, we've got that all set,
what I'm gonna do is put them all in bypass.
00:14:44 I'm gonna add them in
and just sort of see what
combination I might like
through the Drum Crush.
00:14:50 And the Drum Crush is the Devil-Loc.
00:14:52 It's just there to give me
a little bit more grit and excitement
because obviously
I've been doing a lot of
specific stuff for the kick and snare
and also adding the bass into it.
00:15:02 This is just really about
finding a little bit of
cool parallel compression
that's specific to some of
the other drum mic elements.
00:15:10 Let's start with
the room mics.
00:15:29 I added the stereo overheads in there,
it just felt like too much,
it starts to take some of the
definition away from the kit.
00:15:34 I'll take the rooms in and out from it.
00:15:37 It just kind of adds
some excitement to it.
00:16:01 It feels more exciting to me.
00:16:02 None of the overheads
sounded good in it,
actually I'm not really considering
putting the hi-hat in there.
00:16:08 And then let's just try the toms
and let's got to where
the toms are played,
in a couple different spots.
00:16:28 It definitely added
some excitement there,
I'm gonna check it in this Intro part.
00:16:43 It just sounds weaker without it
now that we've heard it.
00:16:46 And I don't wanna go back.
00:16:47 So let's just look it
a little bit the way
that this Drum Crush is
set up on this Devil-Loc.
00:16:53 And I'm just putting the factory default.
00:16:55 The factory default,
the Crush and Crunch
are just a little bit lower,
the darkness is at zero,
the mix is 100%.
00:17:02 I'll leave the mix in 100%,
I darken the tone up,
I just elevate the Crunch
and the Crush a bit.
00:17:13 Sometimes I'll play with the
speed of the release.
00:17:20 Let's just see what the difference is.
00:17:38 The slow release just
make it sound fatter.
00:17:40 There's already a lot of fast
release stuff going on with the drums
on the close kick and snare mics.
00:17:45 It's nice having something
that's pumping a little bit more
on the distant mics,
the ambient mics.
00:17:50 I feel like we've
paid attention to all
the important parts of the drum.
00:17:54 I improved the kick drum sound,
changed the sample balances,
added some SSL EQ to the snare drum,
I fattened it up.
00:18:02 Cleaned up the overheads a little bit,
made the toms a little punchier,
added parallel compression.
00:18:07 I don't really feel like my room mics
need much in the way of EQ at the moment.
00:18:12 This could all change as
soon as we start putting other stuff in.
00:18:15 Basically we've just been
listening to drums and bass.
00:18:18 Typically, when I'm working on my own,
this may take me
anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes.
00:18:24 Thirty minutes being a long time.
00:18:27 I could probably do
a lot of this very fast.
00:18:30 So, I wouldn't have spent nearly
this much time doing all this stuff.
00:18:35 I'd be moving quickly
and now it's time to
turn on my guitars.
00:18:41 I've been listening to
this song for a couple days,
you've seen me talking
about mixing before
and the advice I give you right now is,
I don't try to put things
too much in solo, isolation,
I listen to the drums
as a whole drum-kit,
I only soloed up a few small elements
to just pinpoint some of the
specific frequencies I was
hearing on the overheads,
hi-hat,
Listen to things combined.
00:19:06 If this was a song that I was unfamiliar
with and I was mixing I'd probably spend
10 or 15 minutes just
listening the whole thing
and balancing it and
starting to think about
what elements
were kind of clouding things
or what needed to be prominent
and how things were sounding.
00:19:22 Before we move on though,
I'm gonna just
turn off
a lot of this parallel processing.
00:19:29 I'll leave the Distressor on the Bass Bus
not doing anything crazy significant.
00:19:33 But what I will do is I'll turn off...
00:19:39 So, I'm gonna turn off...
00:19:42 these are all the parallel paths.
00:19:44 Now, just keep in mind
that the drum volume
is gonna change a little bit
because I'm turning off
the parallel overall drum bus.
00:19:51 Let's listen.
00:20:19 Obviously the level
has changed a little bit.
00:20:21 I've made some level decisions,
balances based on
the stuff I've been adding
but you can hear how
much punch and presence
the parallel compression is adding.
00:20:33 But the transients sort of
stay true to the recording.
00:20:36 I like to approach getting
these bus treatments and these parallel
paths together
to really define, especially with drums,
to really define the
sound of the drum-kit
and then go and do
specific things after that,
like if I need to change
the snare drum sound further.
00:20:57 I was kind of doing a little bit of it
along the way,
certain things I'm hearing,
but the general rule of thumb, what
I'm trying to say and impress here is that
it's better to start, in the way
that I started with the drum bus,
I did a Drum Bus EQ that affected
the whole drumkit
and got me towards my
result. And then adding
all the parallel stuff makes
quite a bit of difference.
00:21:20 And then start to do specific things.
00:21:24 I've done some specific
things on individual tracks,
it's sort of very general.
00:21:29 I really need to hear
everything kind of
combined together to know
if the snare drum is bright enough
or too bright, not fat enough, too loud.
00:21:38 I kind of need to get more context
but I think that in general, in the same
way that made an overall balance
and then went started to work on the
mixbus a little bit, to get that set up,
It's just that sort of process for me
where I'm working on
the bigger gestures first,
and then I'll go and deal with specifics.
00:21:56 It's just an easier way to think and work
and then if I need to very specifically go
in and manage a sound
then it's probably a much smaller
gesture and change that I may need to make
on the snare drum or the kick
drum or what have you.
00:22:11 Just really getting things to really
feel a lot more sturdy,
forward and punchy.
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Award-winning Producer, Engineer, and Mixer, Jacquire King, has worked with some of the world’s most influential artists in every role you can imagine in a recording studio. From being an acclaimed recordist to mixing and producing multi-platinum records (9X in the case of Kings Of Leon) by superstars like Kaleo, Modest Mouse, Kings of Leon, Tom Waits, Norah Jones, Buddy Guy, Cold War Kids, MuteMath, Melissa Etheridge, and James Bay.
To date, Jacquire has received several awards for his meticulous attention to detail and unique approach to creating records that withstand the test of time.
His discography is well-known for the variety of music encompassed from the past 20 years. When you see Jacquire’s tutorials on pureMix, you will have the chance to sit next to a true master at work, who strives to enhance the artist's vision and serve the songs he helps deliver to the masses.
