Mixing Jazz Drums advice

[claudemeyer]

I mostly play standard jazz tunes in a trio formula : Upright bass with Trilian, Brushes Drums kits with BFD and myself by recording my guitar.
Until now I adjusted the drums by starting with a BFD mix preset, some fader tweaking and in my DAW a little bit of buss compressor like The Glue on the master output . BUT I read that other users place individual BFD drum outputs in separate tracks and put separate channel strips on each one. So a lot more work with a more detailed result.

Is it a good idea to spend more time for mixing the drums that way ?
Let us remember that I speak of Jazz music and that my drummer is virtual , but we are only 3 .
Many thanks for your advises.

[Gravity Jim]

Try it on one tune and see. If you can hear it, it's worth it. If not, it ain't.

I think that way too much gets made of mic'ing and mixing drums. The best drum sounds I ever heard or ever recorded were done with four mics: bass, snare, and a pair of overheads. (The trick there is a real good drummer.) With top-shelf sampled drums like BFD, I think most of us would be kidding ourselves that we can make them sound better than they sound right out of the box. I may compress them, tape saturate them, EQ them, but it seems like a real waste of resources to split them all out just so you can feel the power of 12 faders for the drum kit and individually tweak that cowbell. (Doesn't BFD have some fairly powerful mixing features in the VI?)

But that's me. Try it, maybe it's awesome.

I think that's pretty good advice for 90% of recording questions. "I dunno, try it."

[Basstrup]

Personally I always bus drums out, and mix in DP. First I don't want to have to go to the VI to change vol or pan. Secondly I like to use MY verbs (at least I think they sound better than the bundled ones). Also I like to control my parallel compression, what gets routed to the compression bus and which compressor. And yea I do use parallel compression on drums on acoustic recordings.

To easy my workflow I have made chunks of BFD, EZD and SD, with all routing setup. So in a new project just load the preferred drum "settings" file to the new project and add the chunk, then everything is ready to jazz - including MIDI setup of all instrument articulations.

edited- spelling, English is no my language

[Tritonemusic]

Personally I always bus drums out, and mix in DP. First I don't want to have to go to the VI to change vol or pan. Secondly I like to use MY verbs (at least I think they sound better than the bundled ones). Also I like to control my parallel compression, what gets routed to the compression bus and which compressor. And yea I do use parallel compression on drums on acoustic recordings.

To easy my workflow I have made chunks of BFD, EZD and SD, with all routing setup. So in a new project just load the preferred drum "settings" file to the new project and add the chunk, then everything is ready to jazz - including MIDI setup of all instrument articulations.

edited- spelling, English is no my language

I understood you just fine, as far as your English is concerned. I pretty much do a very similar procedure as you described. Personally, I need total control of the drum sounds. I don't ever use any of the BFD presets as a starting point. I like things totally dry and prefer to process everything in DP (separate track for everything).

But hey, everyone has their own way of working. And, pretty much as Jim said, whatever works, works.

[mhschmieder]

I'm seeing this post at the tail end of finishing my lunch, so this is a quick hit-and-run, but I mostly want to reiterate what others have already said, which is that there's no "right way" and you may need to invest the time in listening for yourself and seeing what works best for you.

I have gone through this process myself, first with BFD2 and then painstakingly with BFD3 (a paradigm shift from BFD2) quite recently, for all sorts of drums (funk, jazz, rock, metal, r&b, etc.).

I keep returning to my original modus operandus though, which is to record one drum track at a time (vs. spending time setting up unique routing in BFD so I can record them all at once to separate tracks in DP), based on kit pieces.

That is not quite how I record and mix live drums, but my feeling (from comparing different techniques over the course of several weekends) is that it is a smoother workflow and more intuitive, in the context of overall song mixing.

I NEVER use any effects in BFD, or its presets. I may occasionally start with a built-in kit, and swap out kit pieces here and there to make my own kit. I then heavily edit each kit piece for tuning, resonance, bleed, and mic, as well as mix levels -- even though I record one kit piece at a time.

Everything gets centered; no panning at all. This too is different from recording a kit in real life, but I just find it simpler overall, as the resulting tracks in DP are as though I recorded one kit piece at a time in real life. And though that isn't how we do real drums, it gives us more control over the production.

So, in real life, I multi-mic and use multiple overheads and ambience mics. BFD supports this, but in a different way from live drum miking. Thus, I find it best to mix the source sounds that contribute to each kit piece, in my BFD presets, and then do the rest in DP.

For example, I record a single Kick Drum track in DP from BFD, which combines a balanced set of inside/outside mics and whichever OH's I decided to include when I edited the kit piece. I do NOT record BFD's OH's to OH-designated tracks in DP, even though that is how I would record real drums.

I despise the new ambience mics in BFD3 and shut them all down, for the most part, except for certain percussion elements and cymbals. I also disliked the old ambience mics and rarely used them.

One annoying thing about BFD3 is that they are no longer as transparent about which mics were used in the recordings, and they have also taken away the much-loved older functionality of being able to select WHICH mic is being used (e.g. I hate SM57's on ANYTHING and could defeat them in favour of a Neumann on the snare, but can't anymore).

The thing about jazz drums is that they are more about the top kit, in general. So, theoretically, it might make sense to use BFD's routing and use more of the OH's. Yet when I tried that, I still got better results using the same approach as for other styles. I simply use more of the top kit elements and maybe let them take in a bit more of the ambience mics than usual.

I still place a reverb on the kit, and find that more effective than using the recording room of BFD via its many ambience mics. And I think that's one of the main reasons I prefer to do my drum mixing in DP and just record one kit piece at a time from BFD, with carefully designed presets for mic and kit balance.

I can share my presets if you like, but I'm not yet quite done porting them all from BFD2 to BFD3.