Rayzoon Technologies LLC

[ProfRhino]

Hi all,
Although this is a highly subjective matter, I'll try and give you some ideas and concepts that work well for me in combination with JS2 as well as any other drum module.
Ymmv drastically, please keep your ideas coming !

[Premise]
The philosophy behind JS sounds is kind of a middle ground between completely preproduced libraries like EzDrummer and AD on the one hand and raw samples like you get with DFHS / C&V or BFD on the other. The kits sound good straight out of the box but still leave you lots of "headroom" to tweak to meet your personal taste.

[Initial Set-Up]
Before you start doing anything, insert a master limiter in your stereo output. Set it so that it only applies a little bit of reduction when you're close to 0 dB. This is your safety net.
Now reduce the level of your drums by 6 to 9 dB, this is not the time for loudness wars, you want to have mixing headroom left for your other instruments and voices.
Everybody will have his favourite plugin for that, I swear by the UAD Precision Limiter personally, but there's a lot of choice, commercial (Voxengo, Kjaerhus, Waves etc) as well as freeware (the free Kjaerhus Classic Limiter is as easy as it gets and does a decent job if you only use it to catch the occasional peak)

[Sub-Groups]
We'll be working with stereo out only for now, individual outs will be dealt with later.
First create four subgroups in your host's mixer (I'm using Cubase4, the exact procedure might be slightly different in other hosts).
Route the output of JS2 to the first group called "Drums" (G1).
G1 should be routed to G4, called "Drums Complete".
Route G4 to your stereo out.
The 2nd group G2 is called NY (for New York parallel compression, more later), routed to G4
The 3rd group G3 is called "Drum Room", also routed to G4.
The idea is to build a complete submix for your drumkit so you can globally adjust it with G4 in the mix without changing any aspect of the drum sound.
If you want to use a "bus compressor" in G4 to squash the whole kit ('80s metal fans will love it, a jazzer with a quiet brushed tune considerably less), now is the time to do so. Set it to apply a mild gain reduction (3 to 4 dB for now).
This is an area where compressors give widely different results, room to experiment and do some reading what others prefer for your kind of music. Again, the UAD Neve 33609 is killer, but Magix AM Suite, Voxengo, Kjaerhus, Waves and many others also have plugins perfectly suited for that task.

[Kit Choice]
With JS you get a wide range of greatly different sounding kits, especially with the XL version (highly recommended !). Choosing the perfect kit for your song is fun and should easily get you in the general ballpark. Experiment !
You might use the options to fine tune the instruments in the kit piece editor, quite self explanatory imho. Most of the time I found a suitable kit in the presets already, ymmv.
If desired, use the built in Compressor and EQ to tweak (easy), you might just as well use external processing in G1 for more advanced options.
Don't overlook the ambience controls in JS's mixer, you'll hear immediately how they affect the sound.

[Getting The Punch]
By now you should have a decent sound already, travelling from JS through G1 to G4 and then to your stereo out.
We'll be adding additional punch now, so fasten your seat belts !
Insert a compressor into G2 (NY), choose a drastic one, high ratio settings, this is not the time to be subtle.
Turn down G2's fader completely.
Use a post-fader send from G1 to feed G2, adjust the send so you get a good strong signal in G2 with the compressor applying a lot of gain reduction (6 to 9 dB or even more).
Now slowly bring up the fader of G2 until you hear the additional punch clearly, adjust to taste. Compare the result to the original sound by temporarily muting G2, it should be easy to hear the difference.
Various genres of music need various degrees of punch, don't overdo it, but when you need it, it's there.
You could also insert an EQ in G2 to fine tune the parallel compression (EQ before the comp will affect the way the compressor reacts to different frequencies, EQ after is the conventional wysiwyg approach).
Solo G2 to adjust the plugins, keep in mind that this group is not supposed to sound good by itself, it is meant to add additional punch to your drums.

[Finishing Touches]
To put a finishing touch to your drumsound, insert a reverb plugin to G3 (100% wet, no dry signal).
Feed G3 with another post-fader send from G1, then slowly bring up G3's fader until you hear the reverb. A little goes a long way here most of the time.
Experiment with short reverb times, presets like "drum room", "ambience" and the like, but for some applications you might prefer a bigger plate or hall.
Listen closely to how the reverb colours the sound, normally it should not be your typical cathedral style of reverb but the exact opposite, often more acting like a kind of EQ than as a big wash, kind of glueing your drums together in a subtle way.
Experiment, it's good fun and you'll be amazed by the dramatically different results even with relatively low reverb levels.
Personally I tend to mix the room in so that it is barely audible in the complete mix but you immediately notice something's missing when you mute G3, again, ymmv.

[Epilogue]
OK, we're done for now.
If you followed this walkthrough closely you should now be able to control the complete drumsound from G4, as well as having fine control of drum room and NY punch via G3 and G2.

I tried to be as detailed as possible when writing this, in fact, once you get the hang of the concept it is really quick and easy to set up and gives you lots of flexibility to shape your personal sound. It might be a good idea to save this project as a template in your host to use as a starting point for new songs.

Hopefully I'll get around to write a 2nd part dealing with individual outs and stuff.

Have fun experimenting,
Rhino

[charly1310]

Just awesome !

Thanks Rhino

Cheers,
charly1310

[Arcana]

Great post Rhino.

I've often used NY parallel compression on vocals but never on drums so it'd be interesting trying that out.

[ProfRhino]

Thanks, nice to hear you like it.
NY parallel compression is ideal for drum submixes, especially if you fine tune with an EQ/Comp combination.
I've even heard of freaks running separate NY channels for kick, snare and so on, but I've never needed to do that yet.
Have fun jamming and mixing,
Rhino

[Arcana]

Rhino: Just trying to create a NY group in addition to the usual drum group I've got. Either it's a feature lacking in Cubase SL3 or else I just don't know how to.
I can route my drum group to another group but then the whole group would get the NY compression. How do you create an additional group with JS2 without loading another JS2 instance? I can't see an option to duplicate a group. Cubase 4 might be completely different to SL3 in which case it might not be possible.

[ProfRhino]

Arcana,
sorry, never used SL3, but I'll try to walk you through the way I do it in SX3 and C4. Hopefully it's similar in SL.
-- Create 4 groups G1 to G4 like explained in the tutorial.
Technically you right click in the track column in the arrange window, create new track, group channel, 4 of them, stereo.
-- JS out goes to G1
-- G1, G2, G3 all go to G4
-- G4 goes to the stereo master
-- The trick now is to use 2 FX sends in G1 (I prefer post-fader, ymmv) to send the signal from G1 to G2 and G3 respectively, while the output of G1 is still routed to G4.
-- In our "stereo out" example you could just as well use FX sends from JS' stereo output channel instead, in case SL doesn't have sends in groups.
I took the group approach since it will make things easier when working with individual outputs later on.
Hope that clarifies things a little bit, if not, keep asking, please !
Cheers,
Rhino

[Arcana]

Thanks a lot. Ah, you just use the "send" from G1. Easy when you know how. I ended up using about 15 dB compression on G2 and then mixed it in. It improved the sound a lot and made it more "in your face". Great stuff Rhino.

[ProfRhino]

Good to hear you're up and running!
Cheers,
Rhino

[Anti_Luddites]

Excellent stuff, ProfRhino.

It's really good to have some handholding for setting up in a DAW.
Otherwise it was becoming a bit intimidating, inefficient and longwinded.
Now I've got a very good starting point for tracks.

Tutorial works well for Cubase4 Studio, which is the new SL.

Thanks again.

[ProfRhino]

Good to hear !
I'll post some more tips re individual outs next week.
Cheers,
Rhino

[Phil Fee]

I thought I would chime in with another tip on parallel compression.

If you have a compressor with a Wet/Dry mix control (egs Kjaerhus GUP or Voxengo Marquis) you can do the NY compression thing on a single channel. Adjust your compressor with the mix control set fully Wet and then dial in the Dry signal to suit.

If you want to process your kick, snare, toms and hats separately you can route those signals to separate outputs and do this trick on each channel and I would always route each channel of the drum mix to a Drum Master bus as ProfRhino has suggested.

[ProfRhino]

Good points, Phil !
Rhino

[fester2000]

Thanks for this! I'm in the middle of a project and will use these tips to get the drums to sound great. So far, I just squished the heck outta the tracks (which yielded a nice improvement), but these look really slick.

I'm a complete noob, so when you pros let us peek behind the curtain, it's awesome. Thanks again!

[fester2000]

Hey -- just tried these tricks and the drum tracks sound incredible -- really, even without individual routing and treatment of each element (e.g. Track 1 kick, Track 2 snare, etc.). Thanks again for posting the tips.

In Reaper 2.0, to do the parallel compression and separate reverb, it was really easy, but I had to route things just a tad differently.

First, I set up G4 (Drums Complete) as a track, the clicked on the folder to make it the "parent."

I next created three tracks beneath G4 as part of the parent/child routing -- the first was G1 (with the JStix Plugin running in this host). The second was G2 (NY compression with a ridiculous amount of compression using ReaXcomp, routed with input from G1 with output routed to G4). The third was G3 with a free reverb plugin (again routed from G1 with output routed to G4).

With little or no work, using both the stock kit and the dry kits (I haven't yet upgraded to the XT version, though I suspect I will very, very shortly), the drums sounded just incredible. Add punch first, then add the reverb track, and you're up to a passable drum sound almost instantly.

Thanks again to you all for the tips. Hope Reaper users find this helpful!

[Ralph [RZ]]

fester2000, any chance you could post a comparison MP3, plain JS2 versus your processed JS2? I think this may help some users to understand what differences can be achieved.
_________________
Ralph Zeuner
Rayzoon Technologies LLC
http://www.rayzoon.com