Mixing drums - The magic of the Drum Bus

In most genres drums almost covers all of the frequency spectrum in a mix. We seem to like drums being both fat and full-bodied, loud and clear, and having the ability to cut through the mix. If you want to achieve all of these things there is one main factor that needs a lot of attention, besides mixing the individual drum tracks nicely: The Drum Bus.

In order to be totally clear from the beginning, this is what I mean when speaking of a drum bus: E.g. I have 8 mono audio tracks containing a bassdrum, a snaredrum, a hihat, 2 toms, 2 overheads – left and right, and an ambience track. The outputs of these tracks will be sent to the input of 1 stereo Aux track being my drum bus. This allows me to process the drums all together and this is where the magic happens.

To start with you'll need the right chain of effects on your drum bus. I will be giving examples from the particular plug-ins I use myself but the principle would go for any other plug-in or hardware equipment. The order of effects in the chain may vary depending on the circumstances but this is how my chain looks like in most cases:
 

First of all I'll need something to 'colorize' my sound. For this purpose I will look for a pre-amp, a channel-strip or something similar to add some harmonics to the sound. I like to use both the “Decapitator” from 'Soundtoys' and the “PSP Vintagewarmer” from 'PSP Audioware'. They both have EQ controls and at the same time they'll add 'drive', 'warmth' and 'depth' to the sound. They also both have the potential of making some pretty extreme drive settings (whilst still sounding good) which can be a lot of fun going in a more experimental direction. In some cases I will only need a nice EQ to do the job, as the first part of the chain, depending on the recordings and the genre.

Next up I need a compressor. As you are probably aware of there is a whole lot of compressors out there, both software and hardware, a lot of different types (VCA, FET, Opto, Vari Mu, Ect.), but what you'll need to look for is one that compliments the different things going on on a drum bus. For this purpose I will use a FET (Field Effect Transistor) compressor that has the 'lookahead' feature plus the 'parallel inject' feature, namely the FET Compressor from 'Softube'. The cool thing about the 'lookahead' feature is that you can get a smooth sound but still catch the transients. This feature basically splits the signal, delays one side (not hearable) using the non-delayed signal to control the compression of the delayed signal. Along with the 'parallel injection' feature, which is basically is a wet/dry control as we know it from a reverb/delay ect., it makes this compressor a very versatile tool on a drum bus. E.g. You can both have a very fast attack still being able to smoothen the sound turning up the ms of the 'lookahead' and an over-the-top heavily compressed signal with the ability to control wet/dry signal with 'parallel inject'.

Finally I need some reverb in order to glue things a little together. I don't always use reverb on my drum bus but just a tiny little can sometimes do the job. For organic sounding drums I prefer to use convolution reverbs such as the “IR” from 'Waves', the “SpaceDesigner” in 'Logic' or my favorite; the “Altiverb” from 'Audio Ease'. You can use your reverb directly on the drum bus using the wet/dry function, or you can put it on an aux track (making it 100% wet) using the send amount to control the wet/dry balance – depends on how you like to work. E.g. you can sometimes achieve really cool things by putting the reverb directly on the bus before the compressor.