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Bonus: EZDrummer - Bussing and EQ

Onto busing now bussing and that like I said it's a pretty advanced topic so we'll see how quickly I can impart some knowledge on you guys about this so you could use thes e drummer mixer you really could uh there's a few pre sets in here I'll let you hear what what some of them do just this might be enough for you so the drums all right so let's check out I'm going to just go through some of these just check out what they do just so you know basically there's a lot of stuff happening under the hood we don't know what it is because the only parameters that we have here are basically solo mute pan volume and this bleed control thing here so so you may want a little bit more control than that so here's where things get interesting now we see where we're at with this guy as you can see on this slide the default is saying is easy drummer coming down a stereo output is basically the whole kit it says here on one track was really too because it's stereo but that's a whole kit coming down the...

track um and demonstrate that real quick one more time just so everybody knows what that means is check it out solo okay, that is the default now what I mean when I say that we're gonna bust this out means that every individual piece of the kid is going to go to its own track so you have the kick on one snare on the other tom's hat overheads so on so forth and those are gonna be tracks inside your dog so you know you can treat them the way you would treat anything else within a mix you'll have total control over them going to show you guys how to do that real quick see down here where it says track one all right, you need to assign these to go somewhere else you need to tell them where to go because we're another all going to the same place so they all need to go to different places I'm going to keep my language very very basic right now for those of you who have never even heard of this concept those of you who are advanced users more power to you keep up the good work so uh I'm putting the kicks down track three and with this I don't really I don't want to go into any deep explanations on this one move onto other stuff so I just tell you what to do and trust me works I'm putting this to try the both kicks to track three and then I am panning them to the left then putting the snare on four and then the snare comp on four panning to the left not going to bother with the hats no time for that we've got three times okay, this one I'm going to go on five cracked on one track tom to is going to go on five now check this out back tom one you panic all the way to the left brak time to pan all the way to the right floor tom is going to go down six pan it all the way on the left if you guys want some in depth specifics of how this mixer works and why we're doing it this way I'll be back in january we'll be doing advanced drum production and were me covering superior drummer in detail that will be the time to really go into the mixer function it works almost exactly the same but there's a million more options in the superior jobber mixer but with this I just want to get you as roland so just ah do what I said all right, so we took care of the easy drummer mixer x that out so we've got kick snare and the three tom's coming down their own tracks. All right, so that's five tracks you need to create five tracks in your dawn out and make them ox tracks I don't know how that works and logic or in ailton uh but in pro tools they had to be ox so I'm making five I'm gonna name them appropriately with really cool spelling okay I k s and r t won t too and ft sure you can figure out what that means. All right, so remember how I said that in the easy drummer mixer you're telling the sound where to go? Well the pro tools mixer and needs to basically except that sound so you need to tell it what to receive so say we've got the kick coming down three as you can see, the kick is coming down three on the easy mixer right here in pro tools we need teo tell it toe be checking out three so seeing going to plug in these air the inputs going to plug in easy drums and then three left her we planned it to the left that's why? Because right here you have the option for left or right so we pandas on the left is coming down left so now check it out so we've got the kick by itself on its own track you will repeat this process now for the rest of the drones so nice anyways uh we're putting the snare on four see that snare on four in the easy mixer so right here this is my snare track in the inputs plug in four left remember to see it's pan to the left and shows four left all right rack toms we've got two of them on five five left see panda left five right pan to the right and then six left so tom one five left tom too five right floor tom six left all right, now just going to take a quick look at how these tom's were laid out and just do a quick guess that the panning is something like such that might not be one hundred percent accurate but whatever one thing I got to do and this is only because of ah, the audio feed here a creative life I just need teo do some internal busing real quick you guys want to know what out of phase sounds like this is what out of phase and I was like, all right, now I'm gonna show you in face sounds like you guys just got an advanced phase class for any of you guys who say that phase is an important you just heard it's really important you should always check for phase but uh it's a whole other that's a whole other topic and has nothing to do with this. All right? So if you guys don't understand that asked some questions but I did try to go as slowly as I could with that one. Um all right, so we've got our drums coming down individual buses I've still got the symbols coming down the stereo, the stereo to track had easy drummer was on because we don't have time to get crazy so that makes sense to me at least now the cool thing about this sending everything to its own track that then you can affect things individually or as a group so say for instance you want to do pull river well if you were dealing with easy drummer on one track and you put a reverb on it that river would be on everything and like say you're doing metal you don't want that reverb all over the kicks or it's going to come a complete mess so this gives you the option to just send whatever you want to that reverb so typically would be this snare and the toms as you can see with the arrows they're one of the river bus which is then going on its own track to the master output so we want to do some drum compression if we put a compressor across the easy drummer channel it was going down one channel then we'd be compressing everything well what if I don't want to compress the symbol lt's for whatever reason or what if I want to compress those separately well this gives me the power to do just the drums going to the compression so this is a very good reason to set up your signal flow like this and to bus out to individual channels now you how do we begin with the q? Well, I'll tell you that the basic idea is you take stuff away, that sucks and you amplify stuff that's good. Um, this is again a topic that people spend their whole lives getting good at, so you're not gonna you're not going to become a q masters from this, but you might want to know the difference between attractive and added a v q it's attractive is taking away at it is adding, um, say that, for instance, this snare, we're gonna look at the snare so there's some weird frequency and there that's just not working out for our purposes. And, uh, these easy drummer drums are already pre cousteau very sound, pretty damn good. So anything I do is going to be more for the purpose of demonstration than reality, but I'm picking fab filter pro q because has an out analyzer on it. So if I go to a pre and post, that shows me the frequency spectrum before I acute it and after, so check it out, so I'm gonna just do something stupid, ok, like that, you see the darker area that's, what I just did to it and the lighter waves are before I did this to it makes sense, cool, says said, I'm going to blank out the cq back to factor default. And what would be a reason that I'd want teo even eq ua snare that's already been acute? Well, what if it's just not cutting through the mix? What have you got a wall of guitars and it's just not enough let's check it out because through all right but maybe it could snap a little more maybe so try to add a little bit to that listen with it without it now mind you these are not night and day difference is this is a subtle thing mixing is a very cumulative process you're making two percent changes over the course of many, many instruments and all adds up in the end so very curing a scenario unless it's completely messed up and sounds like total garbage you don't want to just just peg all the knobs or anything like that uh you looking to just add a little bit more of that snap and uh let's see within with with it it's just a little clear a little brighter without it's just little dollar without now to me that's pretty apparent if you guys can't hear that well enough in internet land you may want to consider that what you're listening to on his crap because ah well, it bears noting because people listen on really bad systems and one of the most important things to ensure good mixes that you're listening on a proper monitoring rig in a properly treated room most people I don't consider that to be important mix on computer speakers and what not, and so my point is they can hear that you guys can probably hear that clears day if people can't hear that you've got something wrong with your, uh, with your rig, so then try some subtracted vic you just to see what happens so you wouldn't get this even tighter. See now, it's starting to sound a little thin, so maybe just add back a little more right here. So you listen without it's a little dull listen, with not quite so dull. No, I'm showing you guys that in a vacuum for the purpose of this demonstration. In reality, you may want to be doing this with the music playing because everything changes from the music's playing see how much more that cuts through the mix. Now that is one reason you may want to take you snare even it already is he cute? Once again? I'm going to do before and after so just very briefly so that I, uh, don't go nuts. I was gonna do something very quick to the kicks. You'll notice that before I used any q that where you can see everything graphically and that's very good for beginners, but you don't want to rely too much on that this is about your ears so these size of accuse where you can't see anything are ultimately the way to go they're much more advanced but they're very powerful hey that's all I'm going to say on that but you want to get your e queuing to the point where you're not looking at things this right here this is beginner stuff it's cool it's cool to see all this stuff is very helpful especially when you need to isolate a problem but at the end of the day mixing with your eyes is not the way tio get the job done mixing with your ears is and this type of q makes you have to use your years e ah let's talk about compression actually we'll talk about the frequency map of the drums first um basically you've got stuff that overlaps each other basically if you look at this uh frequency spectrum how it applies to any you I'm gonna make a whole new one and then I will explain to you my analogy for it where's that basically if you want to look at this like you have five cups of water filled up with x amount of liquid, you can't have any one of them overflowing that's basically the idea say you want to keep them in a certain line filled with stuff if one of them is deficient than you cue tto adm or one of them has too much of something so that's basically what e queuing is doing and that's what this frequency spectrum chart basically is showing this is where things overlap and this is where things get harry also because this overlap is what causes things to get money so you need to make choices in terms of if you want to hear the click of the kick drum well where's the snap of the snare are they in the same place if so then you got to make choices but again this is a super advanced stuff and uh it's about as far as I want to go with it sure could question here from the chat room scott nell uh scott uh he asks when e queuing drums how many decibels will you usually cut or boost by? Is there a point when you just have to use a different drum? Well, you shouldn't ever use a drum if you don't think it sounds good tio from the get go so if you're in a situation where you're having to do massive amounts of surgery to the sound, then you probably should use that different drum. Now we have situations where we have to do mixes that come to us from other studios where stuff is just messed up and so we have to use the cue very surgically to fix other people's with sticks but that's not an ideal situation and that's why people are paying us um they don't know what they're doing when it comes to recording, but if there's anything you can take away from what I just said is if you have to go too far with the q it's your drum it should sound good dry it doesn't sound good dry something's wrong it could also be your drummer it could also be your drum tuning it could also be your choice of microphone it could also be your choice of pre amp and it could be the room so I had to consider all those factors with really I think he's looking for some and maybe maybe there is no there is no throw out there no absolutely feel like if if you feel like you're fighting it too much, then yeah if you wantto if you wantto drink yourself under the table because of the cueing the snare then is probably the wrong drum uh that's basically it using out the drum it could be something else in the mix like the guitar could not be cute properly put the drum really cut through so you guys end up spending all this time on the drum when it's the rest of mixes the problem also sure, I thought he just meant, uh, drums one human dramas by themselves like just a snare but absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt if something in a complete mix isn't cutting through is sometimes better to look at everything else like you in classic examples kick drum and bass guitar which inhabit the same space you have to make choices is tau who's goingto win who's going to take over exactly which part of the sub frequencies and ah, lots of times when you can't hear the kick it's because the base is taking over so yeah, absolutely what you said but in in terms of early, early on in the process when you're first getting drums going, if you're having to eat you like mad it's just probably the wrong drum, I think basically any time you have to queue like mad there's something wrong? I think the only time that that he queuing like crazy makes a lot of sense is if you're going for an effect like the telephone effect that everybody uses that's a pretty ridiculous amount of cue to get to do that but that's an effect or a perfect examples like the auto tune example that now is so popular and every style of music and that's auto tuning everything to hell and back where in reality the proper use of the plug in is to dial it back some to where you can't even tell it's on there but now just nuking stuff with that is is a desired sound so anyways, uh my point being that you are correct but any time that you have to take you like crazy is something there's, something's, wrong. You got to figure out what it is could be. The drum could be the guitars.