by Meg Stepp

Created on: April 22, 2008

Mixing and recording drums can easily be one of the most difficult tasks of an audio engineer. A standard drum kit consists of a kick drum, tom-toms, a snare, hi-hats, and cymbals. Each piece of instrument has its own frequency range and unique sound in the final mix of the drum as a whole. Finding the right range for each part of the drum kit can be a tedious duty, and the application of equalization can either make or break a drum mix.

First of all, a parametric equalizer allows the engineer to control all parameters of equalization: amplitude, frequency, and bandwidth. On some modules, the amplitude is represented by gain and the bandwidth by Q. It is also a multi-band circuit which means it can adjust and control more than one frequency range, whether it is treble, midrange, or bass. These parameters on the equalizer are adjusted in a fashion often referred to as "boost" and "cut". In this technique, the volume of the higher frequencies are increased, or boosted, and the volume of the low frequencies are reduced, or cut. Parametric equalization is used primarily for four reasons, all of which are present while recording drums removing extra noise , reducing excessive resonance, reducing and preventing feedback, and enhancing weaker tones.

Drum kits are notorious for producing a "bleeding mic" effect due to the amount of sounds it produces. No matter how many microphones one uses on a drum kit, it is impossible to completely isolate each part of the drum. This is where equalization can help. However, no amount of equalization is going to fix a poorly tuned drum. During the recording process, each part of the drum is usually miked and recorded on a separate track. While not perfect in isolating the sounds, it does help to remove the extra noise and the other parts of the drum bleeding through on the separate tracks.

Most engineers like to start with the bass or kick drum. The kick drum is often the loudest in rock and pop music which is why the sound quality is important. The average kick drum produces a plethora low frequencies in the 25 Hz to 400 Hz range. Wadhams suggests using a "sweep and boost" technique to start sweeping the lows at a low bandwidth and boosting those frequencies to find the resonances (a phenomenon caused by overlapping acoustic vibrations). Once locating the offending frequencies, it is recommended to cut them up to 10 decibels. However, this may negatively affect the attack of the kick drum, so to correct this, locate the beater

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