EQing in Pro Tools

kevdrummer28

Senior Member
Im wondering what is a good standard thing from the to add to my drum recordings I've done in lightwave to make them sound standard album quality

Thanks for any help
 
Album quality? Good luck.

I can't tell you what your drums need EQ wise. You'll need EQ, compression, maybe a little reverb on some of it and if we're going 'modern' you'll also probably need some side-chain triggering, a mastering suite and twenty years of experience.
 
Add to that a great sounding live room.

There is no such thing as standard settings for that sort of thing, it completely depends on everything else in the chain. If it was that easy, eq's would not have dials, they'd have settings like "drums", "vocals", "bass"...

But the starting point is the drums themselves and the room, i.e. the recorded sound itself.

You cannot polish a turd.
 
Album quality? Good luck.

I can't tell you what your drums need EQ wise. You'll need EQ, compression, maybe a little reverb on some of it and if we're going 'modern' you'll also probably need some side-chain triggering, a mastering suite and twenty years of experience.

Ah, Duncan, fifty times nominated for the drummerworld 'Golden Sarcasm Award'...I think this'll be the fifty-first! I hope our texan friend is sufficiently thick-skinned to take it, though of course you've hit the nail on the head about the whole thing. A grand misconception is occurring on the part of the OP, namely that EQ works automatically. Hey, I suppose you could do something like that if you knew the fundamental note(s) of the drum in question, then you could have it attenuate different harmonics like a synth...has anyone ever done that? I've often wanted to have EQ which tracked the fundamental note of a monophonic signal (or, given that I'm making this up, let's go for polyphonic!), and allowed you to control the relative volume of the different harmonics whatever the fundamental note, or independent of their frequency I suppose. Wouldn't that be amazing?
 
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Ah, Duncan, fifty times nominated for the drummerworld 'Golden Sarcasm Award'...I think this'll be the fifty-first! I hope our texan friend is sufficiently thick-skinned to take it, though of course you've hit the nail on the head about the whole thing. A grand misconception is occurring on the part of the OP, namely that EQ works automatically. Hey, I suppose you could do something like that if you knew the fundamental note(s) of the drum in question, then you could have it attenuate different harmonics like a synth...has anyone ever done that? I've often wanted to have EQ which tracked the fundamental note of a monophonic signal (or, given that I'm making this up, let's go for polyphonic!), and allowed you to control the relative volume of the different harmonics whatever the fundamental note, or independent of their frequency I suppose. Wouldn't that be amazing?

Could be done in Max/MSP without too much difficulty.
 
Do you know of anyone who's done something like that? It seems such an obvious idea somehow.
 
I don't offhand. But I can think of an easy way. There's an object called sigmund~ that will detect the pitch and then use a biquad~ filter with multiples of the frequency detected in sigmund~ as peaks. Add a gate, sensitivity controls, sorted.
 
Im wondering what is a good standard thing from the to add to my drum recordings I've done in lightwave to make them sound standard album quality

Just as important as what you "add" (which is actually just taking some of what you have already and making it stand out more), is what you take away (what you scoop out, with how tight of a Q, etc...). If there are any conflicting/competing frequencies between a couple different tracks, you have to make a decision about which one to cut back. There is a school of thought in recording that every instrument should have its own frequency range, and for everything to be heard, it should dominate that particular frequency, while everything else backs off. I don't subscribe to this theory as the sole basis of how I record/mix tracks, but I do sometimes favor it with particular projects (especially when mixing projects with various hand drums), and it might be a fresh way to approach your recording to give it that "album quality" edge you're looking for...
 
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