parellel compression can work wonders to get your drums standing out in a mix.
Google parellel compression or "new york compression", theres heaps of FAQs
yeah parallel comp is good.
im always a bit confused as to how much to mix with the original track. Im thinking of the final master stage, i dont wanna have the whole drum track sounding "too" squashed you know?
Slap delay on snare was often used in older recordings, I don't think you'd find it much these days, not in metal anyways. More likely in things like folk music.
I haven't tried it but I wouldn't imagine it would work very well on kick.
If you play with the predelay on the reverb you might get the results you are after. I often have quite a large predelay.
As for other stuff, a bus compressor on the drum bus often glues it all up and fattens it a fair bit. Stillwell audio plugins just released a bus compressor which I think works quite well for this. Also the BF76 that comes with Pro Tools tends to work quite well.
You might also want to try sending the snare off to another auxiliary track with a gated plate reverb. Again, a very distinguishably 80's sound but it's cool fun.
cool mate thanks.
so you put verb on kicks?
Some people create individual sends to the reverb so they can mix in different amounts of kick, snare, tom etc but I prefer to send all the same amount but eq the reverb (within the reverb parameters) to emulate a well treated room with lots of bass traps. So I tend to get rid of a lot of bottom end so you don't get a mess of low end reverb muddying everything up.
I find everything sounds like it is in the same space rather than having a kick right up in your face and a snare way off in a massive hall.
yeah man, sounds good on the verb. at the end of the day the kicks always sound like they dont blend quite enough without something on em.
on the compression thing you use just one buss for the whole kit? or pieces you want compressed?
im using SD2 and using the FX supplied in there as inserts (Seems silly now i think of it). Ive got a good sound, but never tried a comp buss for the whole thing.
would sure as fuck save me some CPU with one buss.