How to Clean Up Drum Recordings

This article outlines a few ways drum tracks can be cleaned up and better prepared for a mix.

Kick
Placing a gate on your “kick in” microphone (the mic inside the kick drum) is useful, but many times the snare still bleeds into the track. Gating the kick in track to open and close off a side chain input can fix this problem easily.

If you have a subkick track (using the Yamaha Subkick microphone), make a mono aux send from that track into in internal bus. If you don’t have a subkick track, duplicate your kick in track and create an aux send from that. Be sure that this track doesn’t contain any snare bleed using an EQ if needed.

On the original kick in track, use a C1 Gate plug-in, or another gate that has a sidechain option. Select the internal bus that correlates to the aux send previously made.

Now the kick in track will only open when the gate is triggered by the alternate track, and since that track has less snare bleed than the kick in track, the snare bleed no longer comes through the gate.

Toms
The toms are notoriously problematic when it comes to bleed from cymbals and snares. Using a gate with a sidechain can be helpful, but sometimes manually editing the track is the best option. Solo each track and gently create fade ins and fade outs around tom hits, making sure the transition between hits is natural. Any unnatural side effect from the editing should be avoided.

Cleaning up tom tracks will help give the cymbals (from the overhead and rooms) much better dimension and clarity. It will also allow for significant compression on the toms without changing the overall snare and cymbal levels in the mix.

Time-aligning tracks
When a drum is hit, the direct microphone picks up the signal first, and the overheads pick up the signal just 3 to 4 milliseconds afterward, since the sound takes longer to arrive.

For a mix with significant overhead level, nudging your snare and tom tracks just enough to align with the overhead signal might improve the sound of the mix, just by correcting small phase correlations. Zooming into the tracks can confirm the measurement in milliseconds.

You may want to try another stylistic technique, adjusting the timing of the room microphones for effect. How do they sound aligned directly with the overheads, versus 20 milliseconds later? Or 40?

Brandon Papsidero
Engineer, Studio West of San Diego
Instructor, "Signal Processing with Waves"