Empirical Labs Distressor EL8-X on electronic drums

A while ago I bought an Empirical Labs Distressor EL8-X. It's a wonderfully diverse compressor capable of delivering really usable results on almost any sound source you feed into it. The transients Distressor is able to create on electronic drums fit perfectly into dance floor tracks.

Here's a quick and simple demonstration of Distressor's characteristic slappy/snappy transients on a kick drum. 16 beats first without and then with Distressor:

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Those transient can really cut through the mix and make your drums sound powerful and aggressive.

The only problem with a Distressor is that you want two of them :-P

API 2500 compressing electronic drums

I just bought my first hardware compressor - API 2500 - and I gotta say it sounds pretty damn sweet. It doesn't break the transients the same way as software compressors do. It always seems to keep the sound clean, natural, snappy and punchy, regardless of the parameters you dial into it.

Here's the API 2500 in action, compressing a dull sounding kick drum with different setting. After 8 beats new settings kick in, which are listed below.

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Here's the uncompressed WAV file for those who want the tiny bit of extra fidelity in the signal.

Be sure to listen to this in loud volume, since a lot of the action is with the bass dynamics.

Also try to compare each of the settings with the original and you'll realize how drastic effect the unit has on the sound without "breaking it to pieces".

-----------

Threshold has been slammed all the way down to -20 (maximum).
Attack = 10ms
Release = 0.5 sec
Ratio = 4:1

Only "Tone" settings of the compressor have been tweaked in these examples.

1 = dry mix
2 = Type = Old, Thurst = Loud, Knee = Hard
3 = Type = Old, Thurst = Norm, Knee = Hard
4 = Type = New, Thurst = Norm, Knee = Hard
5 = Type = New, Thurst = Norm, Knee = Soft
6 = Type = New, Thurst = Norm, Knee = Hard

...here comes a pause...

Threshold is still all the way down to -20 (maximum).
Attack = 1ms
Release = 0.5 sec
Ratio = 4:1

7 = Type = Old, Thurst = Loud, Knee = Hard
8 = Type = Old, Thurst = Norm, Knee = Hard
9 = Type = New, Thurst = Norm, Knee = Hard

The Quest for Dynamics: part 2

Let's think about the audible frequency range as two separate (and partly overlapping) ranges: high and low frequencies. Everything below 250Hz or so could be thrown into the "lower frequencies" category (no hard and fast rules here). Rest of them are higher frequencies for the purpose of this example. No "middle frequencies category" on my list here today.

Here's how the listener perceives these frequencies:

1. Higher frequencies = loudness & presence
2. Lower frequencies = power

If you feel that your track isn't kicking your chest, you need to concentrate on the dynamics of the lower frequencies. If you feel that your mix sounds stuffed with sounds and/or doesn't have depth to it, you need to concentrate on the higher frequencies. In this post I'm going to concentrate on the higher ones.

There is no substitute to keeping the frequency spectrum as clear as possible by designing the sounds in your song so that they don't overlap much in the first place. However, the mixes still tend to swallow certain instruments, like drums in this example. Let's hear the two example audio clips.

A cheeky tune called March of the Underpant Gnomes, with a proper drum mix:

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...and here are the same gnomes marching without extra dynamics on their drum bus:

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The only difference between the two audio clips are the extra dynamic processing on the drums. The drums in the second clip sound like they're further away in the mix due to the reverb on them. Your first instinct might be to turn up the drums or take away most of the reverb AND then again turning up the drums a little bit. Then you'd be left with a track that's surely "in your face" sounding but would sound much more dull due to lack of dynamics.

I achieved the cutting and present sound of those drums by running the whole drum bus through Logic's Enveloper plugin, which is a dynamic enhancer plugin, kinda like Transient Designer I guess (haven't used it so I can't be 100% sure). See the attached image for reference on the parameters I used. All I did was set the initial transient boost to 64% and left rest of the parameters alone.

Ultimately what I'm doing here is making the transient relatively bigger to the rest of the drum sound. You can achieve this same effect by different methods:

1. Enveloper / Transient Designer type of processors.
2. The standard compressor trick on the drums:
• used either separately on each drum or on the drum bus, which ever works for the track
• you can use side chaining here to achieve different effects, for example compress reverberated drums with dry drums on the side chain bus
3. Tweak the drum synth's/sampler's AMP envelope:
• attack = 0
• decay = 10-30ms
• sustain = somewhere around minus 4-8dB. The lower you go, the bigger the transient is, of course

All these methods give you different sound flavors. Also different compressors can sound very different indeed so it's worth trying all the gear you can get your hands on. It would be interesting to try slamming my drums on some high end compressor like a pair of Distressors or API 2500. Maybe some day...

The final thing I want to say is that the more you have dynamics in your song, the more you have choices where to put your sounds in the mix. If for example the drums have a huge dynamic range, you can choose if you want to mix the bass or guitar up loud or put them more in the background and still sound good. Just some food for thought.