Groove3 Into The Lair Dave On Drums

Grammy Award–winning mix engineer Dave Pensado drills down on teaching you how to get your drums sounding just right!

Without a strong drum sound, it’s harder to achieve a strong rhythm and groove within a mix. Topics covered include adding punch to your kick, snares, and toms, shaping transients to give your drums depth and life, getting your 808s to hit right and achieving perfect balance between live and programmed drums.

Dave also goes over mixing various types of kick drums, bringing your live recordings to life, mixing drum room tracks to make them sit better with the kit, mixing hi-hat tracks and the secret to getting your kick and bass to fit in the same frequency range.

Dave then covers making cymbals fit perfectly in the mix, humanizing digital tracks for feel and groove, parallel compression techniques to bring elements to life, and retaining transients when using limiters.

Dave digs in deeper and goes over mixing big drums for maximum impact, new approaches to using sidechain compression techniques, balancing bass and kicks with EQ tricks, creating samples from your drum recording sessions, achieving the ’80s snare drum sound and creating drum loops for your productions.

Wrapping it all up Dave demonstrates mixing 808 kick drums to fit in your mix better, triggering effects on your drum tracks using samples, mixing massive kick drums, mixing big, fat snares to glue into your mix perfectly, creating and using reverse snare drums in your mix and fixing your drum transients.

As a bonus, this series also includes an episode in which Greg Wells and Ian MacGregor share their drum tracking process… Prepare to take your drum mixes to the next level!