Tutorials and support for producers, podcasters and audio engineers
Enter your audio production questions in the search or check out our featured articles below!
What’s the problem with recording drums in a small room? Small rooms aren’t great for recording drums in. They don’t allow the drums to “breathe” i.e. you have early reflections arriving too quickly which in turn means your cymbal and drum hits can be muddy or muffled and lack sustain. There’s . . . Read more
If the kick drum is lacking that chest thumping punch and it doesn’t seem to have much depth to it, chances are it just hasn’t been recorded well enough. No matter how many plug-ins you throw at it, or how long you spend trying to fix it, you’re probably not . . . Read more
When it comes to the sound of your snare, you can do almost anything with using just two plugins: A limiter; and an Expander. Using just these two plugins you can change the attack, body, decay and sustain of your snare. You can even remove background noise. The limiter – . . . Read more
You’ve just finished processing your drums and they sound amazing… when they’re solo’d… but when you bring back the rest of the mix, the other elements take over and the drums seem to vanish into the background. If you’re happy with the sound of the processed drum tracks, you probably don’t . . . Read more
The placement of your room mic can have a drastic effect on whether or not it’s useful later on in the mix. You can’t just drop it anywhere and hope for the best. You might get lucky, but chances are you won’t. If you’re going to go to the trouble . . . Read more
Gated reverbs were incredibly popular in the 1980’s but don’t let that fool you into thinking they’re not still a great tool to have up your sleeve today. A gated reverb on a snare drum is a fantastic way to get the snare to pop, without the reverb tail muddying up . . . Read more
A neat trick to use for a starting point when setting the release value on the compressor for drum tracks, is to set the release value to the tempo of the song. You can do this on the track itself, or on a side-chained track. Go to http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-bpmtempotime.htm Look up the . . . Read more
It’s a great question isn’t it. Can I record my crappy drum kit in my garage? Of course you could use a virtual instrument like BFD, EZDrummer or Logic Pro’s Virtual Drummer. Or maybe programmed drums. Or what about just using samples? They’re all valid options. But what if all you’ve . . . Read more