Widening the drum sound

Music Production Lesson: Mid-Side EQ Processing

Okay, so just leveling stuff out. I'm just listening to my virtual drummer. The drum track has been cut up and changed a little bit. It's sounding nice and EQ'd nicely. However, it's sounding a little bit mono to me.

Processing with Mid-Side EQ

So, what I'm going to do is process it through a mid-side EQ. I'll pull up one of Logic's EQs, specifically a vintage tube EQ. This is a new emulation, actually of the Pultec, very nice!

1. Open Dual Mono:
   I'm going to open it up as a dual mono. Like on a real desk, this signal would be coming in on two dual mono channels, either panned left or right, or mono; it doesn't really matter in this case.

2. Switch to Mid-Side:
   I'm going to turn it into mid-side. I'll go down here and put it to mid-side so I can process both sides. Basically, the mid, which is normally the kick and the snare, would be centered, while anything else, like the cymbals, could be a little bit wider.

3. Widening the Sound:
   This will give me the effect of widening the sound. So, we're taking some frequencies, the outer frequencies, and boosting or cutting them, effectively widening the overall sound a bit.

EQ Adjustment Steps

• Go to the mids:
  • Boost in here.
  • Cut the high attenuation.
• Then, boost the highs a little.

Before and After

This is what it sounds like before: quite mono. Now, it's processed as a mid-side plug-in, adding quite a lot of depth and width to the sound.

Final Adjustments

Okay, so we'll leave that and add the rest of the things.

• Peaking Issues:
  This is peaking things a little bit; I'm going to bring down the volume.

• Kick Discrepancy:
  There is some discrepancy here in the kick, it's doing something a little bit strange. I think it must be quantized to some funny quantization.

• Leveling Drums:
  So I'm just going to pull it into its quantization. It's quantizing on the 16th. Okay, so I'll go ahead and just level all these drums out.