S2 Mixing Problems

[MouseClickDrummer]

Hello. 

I already had a decent project saved with the stock Avatar, which took a long time to compile – how do i blend-import those settings to blend into the new project i am working on in Metal Foundry?

I really need bigger but tighter kicks. Should I use compressor or transient? 

Is it better to bus groups or use sends instead?  

Filters?  I notice lots of those on SDX MF presets.  Low pass filter usage on kicks?

I tend to EQ for a big live sound – it is just natural tendency but then levels become hard to control. And this becomes an issue with the fact that I am very unhappy with the drastic variance of sample pools for many of the toms in many libraries.  Some hits have this inconsistent snap sound to them that is too different from the other samples in the pool and drives me nuts and I wished there was a way to leave out some of those samples in the pool selection.  And the levels on these go too hot in relation to the rest of the hits – i dont mind some humanized volume variance but this is unacceptably too far off in consistency – toms in Avatar and Metal Foundry do this.

I am also discouraged that the ride has to go through the same mics that the other cymbals do.  But I want to be able to isolate rides with a different treble and far different compression.

Wow, all i want to simply just do is to be able to make good sounding music. LOL.

Topic

[Theo Werner]

I feel your pain on some of your issues, but imho you have to approach it from a mixers point of view. You’ve got a recording – with all the imperfections that’s goes with it – and work it out from there. With a bit of tweaking you can end up with a damn good raw drum track. That said, I guess it would be pretty difficult to transfer your Avatar settings to Metal Foundry without any major knob fiddling. It’s different drums, recorded in a different enviroment.

What I do when I come across a strange sounding beat, is to simply change the velocity on the offending hit until it gives me another sample. It can be a bit time consuming, but hey.. I can’t afford a session drummer.. 😉 Well, that combined with a careful balance of leakage from OH and Ambience mics almost always does it for me,

Big and tight kick: Play with the EQ presets in combination with the compressor and possibly the transient thing. I guess you want that nice low end thump, combined with the click from the beater. Try to boost 60-80 for low end, and a pretty narrow 4-5000 boost for the beater click. These are only suggestions (as they all say). Sweep the EQ to find your sweet spots. And a friendly reminder: It will probably sound just fine in isolation when you find your ideal sound, but remember to match it with all the other elements in the mix. Another good thing is to cut a couple of db’s around 250 and/or 400. That sometimes gets rid of the boxy, tin can sound.. Err.. I’m sure you don’t know what I mean, but try it and you’ll see what I mean.

I tend to filter out unwanted low end from almost all tracks to avoid muddy sounding mixes. This also gives me headroom enough to produce louder final tracks.

[Robshi]

Hi

A few ideas come to mind. Firstly if you saved your avatar settings as channel presets then these should be available across libraries. I think the reason you can’t do combined presets across libraries is due to the differences in the channels recorded.

As for the ride it is fairly common practice to just cover the ride using the overheads however if you do want a dedicated ride channel in the mixer then I should think you can set up the ride as an xdrum and then in the microphone management bit set the overhead for the ride to a new channel and rename it xride or something and then route the midi to that ride instead.

With kicks I have had success with using midi nodes to layer kicks from different libraries to get the sound I’m looking for rather than resorting to loads of EQ so that could work for you.

Anyway just a few ideas which I have found useful to me and may help you too.

Rob

[Whitten]

A drum kit is a holistic thing.
Before drum machines and samplers, there were never ‘in ya face’ bass drums, larger than life.
Same with separate ride cymbals.

If you don’t ask you don’t get…… that’s ok, but as a drummer I do find it frustrating that a lot of people (including some well known producers) can’t accept a drum kit sounds good until it’s been taken so far away from the acoustic aspect and pretty much made to sound like a machine.

[MouseClickDrummer]

alright, i finally got MF to sound exactly the way i like it with not a single complaint in sound quality, and clipping is now under control.  Heres how i resolved everything… I figured it would be better for me to start with a preset from TT, and then tweak that.

  But after reading the manual i still haven’t a single clue how the microphone assignment window works. 

[Flaming]

How do you get clipping under control? ? ?

It is driving me crazy in Metal Foundry!!!

[MouseClickDrummer]

you are likely EQ-ing too much bass or treble into it…  i realized this when I realized I was EQ-ing for more of a big  live sound….  you have to go easy on the treble for proper albums… and bring down the individual variation levels from the individual pad variation adjusters

[Author]

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