Group buy drums mixing techniques

[ChrisNinety]

This is the first group buy I've participated in (thanks so much Squid and company!), and it's been a great experience for me. But now that I have these sounds, I'm having a little difficulty using them in context.

My background is in doing tracking and mixing with either real live drums, drum loops (again, live drummer based) or EZDrummer. In those situations, I've never had much problem with getting the kit to feel coherent, but I'm struggling a bit with the STm kits. I'm wondering if folks are using the provided impulse responses on the whole kit to kind of gel the kit pieces together or what techniques you're using to get a real live drum sound out of these kits?

Don't get me wrong, the samples and programming are excellent. I just find myself missing the ability to hear the hi hat in the overhead or bringing up the room mics to get more of a cohesive sound. Even the ambient kits feel a little disconnected to me out of the box.

I guess the answer might be to buy the multitrack versions of these kits, Or maybe I've been cheating all this time by using the ambient mics. But either way, I'd love to improve my skills by working with what I've got rather than just spending more money!

Thanks for your time!
-Chris

[maximilians1]

Hi Chris I have little mixing knowledge myself but had a look at the hybrid kits and some of them really use the impulse reverbs to good effect, that might be something to check. Myself I've had trouble using the impulses without getting unnatural sounds like the snare really ringing too much (hitting a room harmonic or something), there may be a bit of an art to it I don't know. I did find out that at least with hats its easier to get ambience with them by using a combination of plate verb and the dsp reverb to simulate overheads and room mics.

[Squids]

With STm kits you do have to think differently than live drum sessions. It's actually in many ways EASIER to mix because you can REALLY just adjust the level of the hi hats and/or process them separately of being concerned about overheads because they're mixed in already. If you wanted to be able to adjust the amount of directness vs. overheads though you really DO need the Multitrack kits. The impulse rooms can help when you want a variety of ambiences to experiment with. You have more flexibility but they don't sound AS good as having the room samples in a Multitrack kit.

So you might WANT to spend more money just for the dual options. If you were in the group buy then you got the option to get TWO Multitrack kits for free so my suggestion is to try those and if you like the way they work then pick up some more. You can even buy the Multitrack kits a la carte on www.downloadablesoundz.com in the instruments section. Even if they are DM1 versions we're updating them for free to DM2 within the next couple of weeks.