Routing for an extensively miked drum kit. Some drum tracks go directly to the main drum bus (21), while others are routed there via aux tracks for submixing. You can see that all of the individual tracks are in a group.
We continue our crash course in editing and mixing drums.
Last month, in my SOS July 2023 workshop, I outlined some of the techniques and methods I use to organise and prepare live drum tracks. While those steps may seem a bit tedious, they are essential to ensuring an efficient workflow further down the line.
It should be noted that, even if working with live drums isn’t in your immediate future, the techniques and concepts I’m sharing here are applicable to many other audio editing tasks.
Let’s assume that you took my advice and your live drum tracks are now grouped, gain‑staged, and in the correct polarity, and that you’ve created Track Alternatives for each of the different drum takes.
Auxes In Motion
While assigning buses and aux tracks to your drums may fall more under the umbrella of mixing, there are indeed some editing tasks that benefit from it. It’s not unusual to have several tracks for the kick drum (in, out, sub), snare drum (top, bottom), toms, and ambience (room mics, mono overheads), so it makes sense to bus each of these groups to their own aux track. Processing the individual tracks is still possible, but now we have an easy way to process them as subgroups, and to quickly mute and solo them.
Start by busing the drum tracks to one master drum bus. Select all of your drum tracks in the Main window, right‑click (or Control‑click) on any of the tracks and select Create Track Stack. Select Summing and hit Create. If all of your tracks were already bused to an aux track, Logic preserves this in the Track Stack output.
Newer versions of Logic Pro allow you to create nested Track Stacks that would do most of this work for you. Simply apply the same steps to each group of tracks as we did for the main Track Stack.
While we are at this stage, let’s create those aux tracks I mentioned. In the mixer, hit Control+N multiple times to create between eight and 12 auxes. We won’t only be using these aux tracks for our drum routings: we will also use some for effects, reverb and parallel processing. As you add each one, they will pile up on the right side of the mixer. Let’s Shift‑click to select all of the new aux tracks. While holding down the Option key, click on the input of the leftmost aux and select a bus (preferably one with unused buses after it), and Logic will assign each aux’s input consecutively.
We now need to get our aux tracks into the Main window and into our drum stack. With all of the auxes selected in the mixer, hit Command+T. Now go to the Main window and drag the aux tracks into the drum stack. Once they’re in the stack, Logic should have changed their outputs to that of the stack.
Select the three kick drum tracks, for instance, and change their output to the input of the aux you’d like to use for your kick subgroup. Carry on in this fashion with any combinations that work for you. How you choose to route the individual drum tracks is a personal choice. Of course, not every track needs to go to an aux; they can go directly to the main drum bus.
As for processing, add any effects you wish to the remaining auxes. Reverbs, ambiences, compression, distortion… all fair game!
Start Making Sends
Once you’ve created aux sends for one drum track, you can use the Settings tab to Paste Sends Only onto the others.I like to have sends to these buses in place on each drum track, whether it’s a candidate for such effects or not. Then I simply disable the send knob if I don’t need it. Start on the leftmost track and add sends for each of the effect auxes you’ve created. You can dial in some rough levels and disable the ones that you don’t want to use.
Now go to the Settings tab and choose Copy Channel Strip Setting. We certainly don’t want to paste all the settings into the other tracks — after all, we’ve just set up our routing and added gain plug‑ins for flipping polarity — but we do want to copy the sends. Go your next drum track, click on the Settings tab and choose Paste Sends Only. Repeat for the rest of your drum tracks.
Tom Tom Club
In the next instalment of this series I will be discussing an array of techniques for ‘cleaning up’ your tom‑tom tracks in Logic. However, I wouldn’t recommend putting them into practice until after you have a composite edit (including Flex edits) that you’re satisfied with. There is one exception, though, and that’s my region‑based automation tom hack.
Typically, the tom tracks sound great on the actual tom hits. The problem is, the spill when they’re not playing tends not to sound great. Compounding this issue is the fact that any EQ and compression that you might want on the tom hits can make the spill sound even worse.
My quick‑and‑dirty tom mixing hack cleans things up pretty well for this stage and, in some cases, may be all you need for the final mix. Start by moving your toms bus close to your toms tracks in the Main window. Get a ballpark level that works well when the toms are actually active. Make a mental note of where that level is on the bus’s fader. Now pull the fader all the way down.
Locate a section of the song where the toms are active and, with the Pencil tool (Shift+T), draw a region on the toms aux track. Position the region so it starts a beat or two before the first tom hit and extend its length so that it ends a bit after the last hit on the sequence.
Now hit A to enter Automation mode.The track should default to showing volume automation. Draw nodes at the beginning of your region, a beat into it, a beat from the end, and at the end itself. Then grab the line between the four nodes and bring it up to the level you made a note of earlier.
Now you can select this region and paste it anywhere in the timeline where the toms are active. The automation gets copied with the region! You can get pretty detailed in dialling in the perfect amount of automation for each region, but the point of this technique is to simply achieve a working balance while you continue tweaking your masterpiece. Even better, it should work with any of the other drum takes!
What I love about this technique is that I can visually identify where there’s activity on the toms at a glance. I sometimes even hide my tom source tracks after this stage to tidy things up a bit.
A completed drum comp. Because the different takes are colour‑coded, you can easily tell which take each section was taken from. At the bottom, you can see my method for easy tom level automation.
Talking Edits
In Part 1, I discussed loading (or recording) each drum take onto a Track Alternative. Now we need to put together one performance from the various takes.
Logic names each Track Alternative automatically, but I would rename them so they make more sense to you (not just now, but when you revisit the session later!).
Here’s how I approach assembling a comp. First, colour the regions of each take differently. Then identify the take that is closest to being perfect. Create a copy of this take by choosing Duplicate from the Track Alternative drop‑down menu. If this isn’t visible, make sure Track Alternatives is ticked in Track Header Components. Since the tracks are grouped, this only needs to be done to any one of the drum tracks to affect them all.
Rename the duplicate something like ‘Comp 1’. Now, however much damage we inflict on these drum tracks, you always simply switch back to the original Track Alternative.
As you audition the tracks, just concern yourself with the overall performance; we will be getting into Flex quantisation next time. For now, we just want the best takes for each section in our comp.
When you arrive at a section that could be improved, set the Cycle range around it. Use the key commands for Next/Previous Track Alternative (or switch it manually) and see if the section is better performed in any of the other takes.
If it is, copy the section by selecting any of the drum regions, then going to Edit / Cut/Insert Time / Cut Selection Between Locators. Copy the regions (Command+C), go back to your comp Track Alternative, and move the playhead to the beginning of the edit point. Make sure you have the topmost track selected, and paste (Command+V).
If you’ve never comped a drum performance together, you may find it surprising how little finessing it takes to mix and match the takes.
If you’ve never comped a drum performance together, you may find it surprising how little finessing it takes to mix and match the takes. Usually all that’s needed is a little adjustment of the beginnings and ends of the regions (crossfades are rarely necessary) to make a seamless comp.
