How do I get my kicks and snares loud and big while mastering?

C

Christian Ramirez

New member
I recently listened to an album called PARTYNEXTDOOR 3 (P3) and stumbled across an interesting thing about the actual mastering in the songs. The kicks and snares were so loud and "in your face".


Ex.
PARTYNEXTDOOR - Not Nice
PARTYNEXTDOOR - Come And See Me


How do I achieve these big drums?
 
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It's best to have every thing @ the right level from the mixing stage before it reaches the mastering stage, but if you have no choose you can always use a multiband compressor and only compress the low frequencies...
 
EQ and compression basically. to acheive the "in your face" feel a lot of beginners just raise the volume of the kit but the problem with that is that sounds that rely on sheer volume will get will drown when dynamic range is reduced. So what you wanna do is find the freq's that are important for your kick/snare to stand out. A exercise is slapping a limiter and compressor on your master bus and try to acheive the loudest master that still has knocking drums.
 
What makes you think this is a mastering thing anyway? The mix should be about 95% there before it goes to mastering. If the kicks & snares are muffled and messy, mastering won't fix it (or if it does, then it's actually probably mixing).
 
In mixing session try to cut (with precisie Q) the biggest peak on EQ, compress it and saturate :)
You can always fast-sidechain the snare but its not so simple sometimes and not recommended in 80% of songs ;)

Peace
Krystian San
 
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