How to Mix Drums in Logic Pro — Real Session Walkthrough

How to Mix Drums in Logic Pro — A Real Session Walkthrough

We're continuing our series following a song from start to finish with my band Camaro 67. The track is called Late Night, and after recording the band live in one room and editing the session into shape, it's finally time to start mixing. In this video, the focus is entirely on the drums, and in this post I'll walk through the approach in a bit more detail so you can follow along even if you're working on your own project.

Mixing drums well is one of those skills that pays off across almost every genre. Once you understand the process for blending multiple microphones, shaping tone with EQ, and adding some glue with compression, you can apply those same ideas to any instrument group in your mix.

Starting With a Clean Slate

Before diving into any new stage of a mix, it's worth creating a new project alternative. This gives you a saved snapshot you can always return to if something goes sideways later, without risking the work you've already done. I named this one "mix drums" and from there, the actual mixing began.

At this point the session had a very rough level balance and no plugins on anything. That's intentional. Rather than building on top of whatever levels were set during recording, I brought every fader back down to zero and started fresh. This is a habit worth building. A mix built from scratch tends to be more intentional than one built on top of leftover recording levels.

I also muted everything except the drums for now. Bass, guitars, keys, congas, horns, all silenced. Mixing drums in isolation first, before anything else is playing, makes it much easier to hear exactly what each microphone is contributing.

Setting Up the Master Bus First

One thing worth mentioning before getting into the drums themselves: I loaded a few plugins onto the master bus right at the start of the session, before mixing a single track. This might seem backwards, but there's a good reason for it. Whatever processing sits on your master bus is going to colour everything you hear from that point forward, so it makes sense to have that coloration in place before you start making EQ and level decisions.

In this case, since this particular mix is heading toward an actual release rather than just a demonstration, I used a combination of Logic's built in plugins and a few third party ones I rely on regularly, including some console emulation and tape saturation plugins. I want to be clear about something here: you absolutely do not need third party plugins to get a great sounding mix. Logic's stock plugins are excellent and capable of professional results on their own. The concepts in this video apply just as well whether you're using Logic's tools exclusively or mixing in a few extras of your own.

Mixing the Kick Drum

With the master bus set, the actual drum mixing started with the kick. This session had two kick microphones, so the first step was grouping them into their own track stack within the larger drum stack. This keeps things organized and gives you a single fader to control both kick mics together once they're blended to taste.

For each individual kick mic, the general process was the same: start with a bit of compression to control the dynamics and add punch, then sweep through frequencies with an EQ to find what needs boosting and what needs cutting. A useful trick here is using a basic EQ purely to scan and identify problem or pleasing frequencies, then muting that EQ and making the actual tonal changes in a different EQ plugin whose character you prefer. It sounds like an extra step, but it separates the analytical part of EQing from the creative part, which can make decisions clearer.

To add some extra weight and consistency to the kick, I also blended in a triggered sample using a drum replacement plugin. This works by detecting the hits in your recorded track and using them to trigger a clean sample underneath. It's a common technique in modern production, and it's particularly useful when the natural recorded kick is good but could use a bit more low end punch or consistency across every hit. If you'd rather stay entirely within Logic, there's a built in way to do this too, by flattening the track and using the Replace Drum Track feature to generate a MIDI track you can trigger any software instrument from.

Once all three kick sources were blended (both mics plus the triggered sample), a touch of group compression on the whole kick stack helped glue everything together into one cohesive sound.

Mixing the Snare

The snare followed a similar process to the kick, since we also had two microphones, top and bottom. The top mic carries the main body and tone of the snare, while the bottom mic adds brightness and the characteristic snap from the snare wires. Both were treated with compression and EQ individually, then blended together.

As with the kick, a triggered sample was added to reinforce the snare and tighten up consistency across hits. One thing worth knowing about this kind of triggering technology is that it isn't always perfect on the first pass. Some hits might get missed, especially during faster fills, and the trigger settings need a bit of fine tuning to make sure it's responding to the snare itself and not picking up bleed from nearby toms or cymbals.

To finish the snare, a touch of reverb was added using a dedicated reverb bus, which lets you control how much space is added without committing that effect directly onto the track itself. This is generally a better approach than adding reverb directly to each track, since it's more flexible and keeps your session cleaner.

Mixing the Toms

The toms got a similar treatment, though there was an extra consideration here: bleed from other drums coming through the tom microphones when the toms aren't actually being played. One way to manage that is a noise gate, which only allows sound through once it crosses a certain volume threshold. This keeps the tom mics quiet during sections where they're not in use, which cleans up the overall drum sound considerably.

Both the rack tom and floor tom were processed with their own EQ, and compression.

Mixing the Overheads

The overhead microphones capture the cymbals and hi-hat, and they needed a different approach entirely. Rather than adding compression, the focus here was almost entirely on EQ, cutting out a lot of the low end bleed from the kick, snare, and room sound that naturally finds its way into overhead mics. The goal is for the overheads to add shimmer and air to the cymbals without muddying up the rest of the drum mix with unwanted low frequency content.

Blending in the Room Mic

The final piece of the drum puzzle was the room microphone. On its own, a room mic tends to sound rough, distant, and not particularly flattering. But that's not really the point of using one. The trick is to push it hard with compression, essentially overcompressing it until it sounds gritty and a bit trashy in isolation, then blending it in at a low level with the rest of the drums.

Used this way, a room mic adds an energy and sense of space that's very difficult to recreate using close microphones alone. It's a technique worth experimenting with if you have any kind of ambient or room microphone in your own recordings, even a fairly basic one.

The Result

With all the individual drum elements blended, EQ'd, compressed, and glued together with some final processing on the overall drum bus, the difference between the original unmixed drums and the finished result is significant. What started as a fairly flat, unprocessed recording becomes punchy, present, and ready to sit alongside the rest of the instruments.

The next step for this song is overdubbing the horn parts, which I'll be documenting in an upcoming video. After that, we'll move on to mixing the rest of the instruments, so if you want to follow this project all the way through to a finished, mastered track, keep an eye out for those.

This video features Late Night by Camaro 67
http://www.camaro67music.com/

TIMECODES:
00:00 Introduction
00:36 Setting Up a New Project Alternative
01:46 Preparing the Drum Mix
04:29 Setting Up the Master Bus
07:24 Mixing the Kick Drum
13:21 Adding a Triggered Kick Sample
15:38 Blending Three Kick Tracks
18:11 Mixing the Snare
22:09 Adding a Triggered Snare Sample
23:44 Blending Three Snare Tracks
24:52 Snare Reverb
27:25 Mixing the Toms
35:25 Mixing the Overheads
37:37 Blending in the Room Mic
40:11 Before and After — Final Drum Mix
40:48 What's Next in the Series