Little drum machine mixing tip
KeithHandy posted in Producing on March 4th, 2008
I don’t know that this will be useful to anyone, but if you’re remixing an old song where you used a drum machine (or electronic drums), and tried to make it sound like real drums… and it has this stupidly wide stereo spread… you could of course move the left and right inward, so it’s not so wide, but let’s say you actually want to keep the “wideness”, but less of the annoying fakeness as tom toms bounce around unrealistically across your ears… make a copy of the track, swap the left and right, delay it by about 40 to 50 ms, and mix it in quietly. The delay will not only soften the unrealistically perfect transients (attacks) a little, but also create more of an open “two microphone” sound, by giving something to the opposite ear, and filling a void that would have no business being there in the real world.
