Mixing Midi Drums Cheat Sheet
Mixing Midi Drums Cheat Sheet
Mixing Midi Drums Cheat Sheet
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b. Often times the main drum kit in your plugin may not sound all that
realistic
c. Search around and mix and match until you find a good fit
3. Mixing the Drum Kit To Sound More Realistic
a. Mute the included reverb that comes with the drum software and use
your own instead
b. Add the drum set to a general reverb you use for the whole mix to make it
gel with everything else
c. Take note of all the drums playing in your software and mute or lower the
volume of them. (mute a bottom snare for example if you don’t like it)
d. Extract all the individual samples from your drum software and place
them in their own tracks in your DAW so you can mix them like normal
e. Use a reference with a real drum kit and try to get a similar sound if you
can
f. Try using saturation on the drum bus to get rid of any “sterile” sound the
samples may have
g. Try using parallel compression
i. Use a compressor with a mix knob to balance the compressed
signal with the clean signal
Once you have finished getting your MIDI drums sounding as realistic as possible, you
can continue on mixing your entire track with great sounding drums!
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