compressing virtual drums?

[johnlewitt]

So I'm an Ez Drummer 2 user, but I think this question would apply to Addictive Drums and other programs.

Do you compress these drums? Generally speaking you only need to compress drums (or any instrument for that matter) to try and even out the playing, but EZ Drummer is pretty consistent in their loops, given it's virtual nature. Do you think they are already somewhat compressed to achieve their balance out of the box? Or do you treat them as if it's a real drummer? It seems I've been compressing them more for tone than for the actual compression of the performance.

What are everyones thoughts?

John

[Len911]

"Our brains are also tricked in our perception of long vs. short sounds when it comes to loudness and power. We tend to think longer sounds are louder than shorter sounds of the same volume. Producers use this bias all the time, especially on drums. If you use a compressor to raise the volume of the decay of a drum hit, the drum will sound louder without actually increasing the volume of the initial occurrence of the sound. It will also sound more powerful because it doesn’t decay as fast."
An excerpt from https://reverb.com/blog/psychoacoustics ... orts-sound

I remember this off the top of my head from a recent paste in another post. I'm not sure that I disagree with your premise, because yes, I suppose you could think of it as "evening an instrument out". I'd question though whether an instrument could be mix ready out of the box, or at least for every occasion or possible useage? Otoh, one of the virtues of the Ocean Way drums was that as a kit they have "mix" or premix choices?? I'm not gonna commit and call it "artistic choices",lol!

[sabalsounds]

John - I used to compress the life out of virtual drum kit pieces because that's what everyone was doing on tutorial vids. Now I compress as little as possible the individual kit pieces prefering instead to apply master bus then bus compression as needed for the track. This is of course all extremely subjective.

If you haven't tried this I would recommend trying parallel compression of the whole kit too before drilling down to the kit pieces.

Good luck!

[Kolstad]

John - I used to compress the life out of virtual drum kit pieces because that's what everyone was doing on tutorial vids. Now I compress as little as possible the individual kit pieces prefering instead to apply master bus then bus compression as needed for the track. This is of course all extremely subjective.

If you haven't tried this I would recommend trying parallel compression of the whole kit too before drilling down to the kit pieces.

Good luck!

+1 This, and tuning the kick to the key of the song. Sometimes EZ drums sound too squeeky clean, and off. So, parallel compression and tuning can help bring them more to life and sit more natural in the mix. Some real drummers make a big deal out of tuning. I use Superior Drummer for this, though, not sure if you can in EZ.

[andygabrys]

John I encourage you to try this on your stuff.

set the EXdrummer to multi-output, create Auxes in Logic to receive all the other audio.

now attack those sounds with all the compression eq and junk you can muster. A/B against the raw sounds.

Now change the default mixer preset in EzDrummer - do the same thing again.

What sounds better?
what sounds more exciting?
what sounds like an album?
what sounds overdone?
what actually works when you stop soloing the drums and turn on the rest of the mix?

realize that the presets in EZdrummer might be capturing sounds that are already eq'd and squished to some degree. Different VI's have different kinds of presets and there are a lot out there that are truly ready to go (to my ears).

now a question re: compression:

what are you trying to do by compressing?

here are a few things that compression does by tweaking settings:

makes hits similar volume.
accentuates attack or deadens attack
increases the level of the "room" sound that the drum is recorded in
makes cymbals pump
creates an aggressive sound (especially using certain modeled compressors that have a semi-distorted signature when pushed).

You are right, if its MIDI triggering a VI drum set, you don't necessarily need compression to even out the volumes, you can just tweak the MIDI programming, but too much the same will sound drum machine like.

Just for discussion sake, I have in my template:

all drums go to a master drum buss.
all drums also go to a parallel drum buss that usually has an 1176 on it. I set this for varying levels of stun if I want that sound. All of the effects noted above can be had on this buss.

then I mix the two in some ratio that feels right for the song. Sometimes one or both of the busses might have a tape sim plugin inserted as well. Another layer of goo. Sometimes it feels right.

when I use real drums, I have the same setup. And I eq and compress each kit piece individually depending on what it sounds like and what i want. Probably in the end arriving at something similar to some presets in some drum VI's.

just what makes sense here.

[johnlewitt]

This is all great stuff, guys, thanks!

With EZ Drummer 2 introducing the built in Mixer my/our options have become amazing, so it did get me to wondering if there was already compression in there. Obviously you can compress things multiple times, but regardless of what you do, you just want it to sound good in the end.

So what drum master buss is everyone using?

And Andy, on the the send to your master buss and parallel buss, what is the send value you use?

John

[andygabrys]

T
So what drum master buss is everyone using?

And Andy, on the the send to your master buss and parallel buss, what is the send value you use?

John

here are the individual channels that feed my drum master buss (I set mine to output to Buss channel 10 in the Logic mixer)




and then the two drum master busses - the "normal" one, and the "compressed" one.


I tweak all the settings depending on what is being set to these channels so these control settings aren't representative of anything.

Note that I route the output of the drum channels to the drum busses, I don't send. And you can send to multiple busses with different FX inserted as long as all the auxes have as their input Bus 10 for example.

HTH

[cassmcentee]

Great Topic Gavin, Thank you

So I activate all channels in EZD2, play with them individualy and then route them all to a GROUP channel named Drums, add a little more compression and a hint more of reverb thinking that this might help to make it cohesive. When I see (for example's sake) that the snare is redlining my output but I happen to be enjoying the overall sound of my drums, then I will compress just the snare till it evens out enough to keep me out of the red. Sometimes I don't send the kick to the group channel. It's all experimentation with me thus far (not ashamed, just learning)

Andy... In Cubase I create a Group Channel, is that the same as a "BUS"???

[andygabrys]

Yeah Cass as far as I know.

In logic busses are used in general but they can be for fx or for submixes which I am using here.

Not a VCA though. Cubase and logic both have those and that's a different application.

HTH

[cassmcentee]

Thanks Andy!