Hey guys, Matthew Weiss here — theproaudiofiles.com, mixthru.co, and a special shoutout to Produce Like a Pro. That’s where I got these multitracks from. It’s run by my friend Warren Huart. He’s got some fantastic educational content, and you can get these multitracks that I’m using for this tutorial over at that site, and I encourage you to do so.

Okay, let’s get into it. So I’ve setup my drums in a way where they sound really good on their own. When I bring them into the mix, they sort of start to get swallowed up a little bit.

Let’s give it a play.

[mix]

Right. They sound good. When I hit that solo button, they sound big, they sound thick, they sound punchy, they have attitude and color, and all sorts of great stuff. The groove is there, and then they just feel — the snare and the kick just get swallowed up a little bit inside of all of the guitars and synths and everything like that.

Now, here’s the problem. If I start pushing the snare and pushing the kick, all of that compression that I setup on my drum busses are going to start to react in a different way, and I’m going to start to mess with what I setup before.

I like what I setup before, I don’t want to change it, I just want the snare and the kick to come out through all of this craziness.

[mix]

Well, here’s a really easy trick that saves me a ton of time and headache, and sounds awesome. I just go straight from the snare and kick track directly to my outputs. So I circumvent all of the compression. And you don’t have to do this a lot, like, this is going to be — the snare I ended up pushing a little bit more, minus 10.5dB in the kick, I ended up pushing not quite as much, minus 15dB, but check it out. Here’s the before…

[mix, before snare and kick direct to outputs]

After.

[mix, after direct to outputs]

So I get that same awesome compression action, I get the same saturation from my parallel distortion, I got everything the same, now I’m just getting a little bit more of the snare, and it’s cutting through, and it’s right on top of the mix. I didn’t have to reconstruct everything in the world.

Quick, easy tip that will save you some time.

Alright guys, until next time.