Anyone else have trouble getting a good sound out of the Metal Foundry kick drums? I also bought the Andy Sneap presets and I don’t even like the sound of those kick drums, it seems like he just candy coated everything with tons of reverb.
Anyone else have trouble getting a good sound out of the Metal Foundry kick drums? I also bought the Andy Sneap presets and I don’t even like the sound of those kick drums, it seems like he just candy coated everything with tons of reverb.
No, I don’t have a problem with TMF kicks. They are raw and unprocessed so they require mixing. There are plenty of good, raw kicks in TMF library. Big fat kicks, and tight kicks. They all can be shaped into usable sounds.
The Sneap presets are a good place to start but, like any presets, need to be tweaked to fit in anyone’s tracks. If you find them too reverb ladened, adjust the Chamber channel. Adjust the other channels to taste as well.
Well rightly so Scott, you shouldn’t have a problem mixing them, but you gotta admit, it seems this question pops up a bit 🙂
Megadedly, I can’t possibly explain all of the stuff here but I would go for a few main pointers and google how to do them 🙂
Firstly for a metal implementation, there’s almost always a parallel drum bus, with normally pretty heavy compression this certainly will aid more power to the vibe of the drums whilst still having the original dynamics alongside (not so much of a nuclear blast mix yuck)
On the kick channel try various distortions/overdrives to give a more “paddy” rather that wood block sound, some will allow you to EQ the range or which the dist is applied (nomad factory make a driver the ADR-25-3)
Also ensure your guitars etc (esp bass) are sidechained off the kick, this will help the other instruments “pump” a bit more with the drums
Finally the kicks seem to want quite a bit of EQ’ing (can’t recommend fab-filter pro-q enough) but if you want a quick audition of the direction the kick might take, it’s always handy to have something like a BBE maximiser on the channel and just A/B
Well rightly so Scott, you shouldn’t have a problem mixing them, but you gotta admit, it seems this question pops up a bit 🙂
Sure, and I would imagine these type of questions have motivated Toontrack to create all the Producer Presets packs as well as EZmix and EZmix packs. They are aimed squarely at the beginner mixing engineers looking for good sounds fast.
Personally, if I was new to mixing drums I would definitely consider libraries from the EZdrummer line of products that are much more ready out of the box. The Metalhead EZX definitely has that type of sound, IMHO, with very little fader tweaking of the kick channels and the Kick TRIG channels. No presets to mess with that may or may not fit the user’s song.
Then again, there is something to be said about the whole learning process of having to deal with raw drum sounds and developing techniques to mix them properly. Having premixed sounds will do nothing for the learning process.
I couldn’t agree more on the learning process certainly being beneficial, and I’m sure toontrack would’ve done extensive market research for future developments and enhanced product offerings, I guess my statement was purely aimed at the fact that people DO seem to crop up wondering how to get deeper or harder hitting kick drums on TMF, and with credit although EZdrummer is much more pre-processed and does save a lot of time, the presets aren’t exactly useful there is a distinctive “plastic” overtone to the EZDDKFH although admittedly i’ve not spent much time using MH’s…
Added to the fact I’ve had access to the presets with reference subs in the equation and been able to see it for myself, I’m not saying it can’t be done, just iterating from experience what others have seen, and given the exponential changes to users requirements as newer mix techniques and tools becomes available figured it was again food for toontrack to chew over if you will
We tend to send the whole drum bus via an aux send to the parallel compression track, you could quite happily do it individually however we send our pre-fader so as only to compression the original drum sound (we eq the original track aswell)
We found it a touch easier to get the right sound before compression so as to enhance overall sound and besides individual aux sends can be a be tough to balance when trying to get the levels right under compression and normally the parallel compression is pretty heavy (well for us anyway)
We’re working on a new template which should be finished in a couple of days, so of the processing can be done outboard, we’ll upload a link and see what you guys think.
wow!! erm im still fully blown away by the kicks on the metal foundry expansion especially putting ssl duende eq or the drum channel strip on them to get them really poundy and solid, wow never thought id read that on these forums!!
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