Drums and bass are the foundation of any good song or track. You can’t capture the listeners’ attention without loud drums banging in the background.

Even though they’re one of the easiest sound effects to add to your tracks, there’s a fine line between pros and amateur work.

This blog will teach you how to perfect the drumming sounds for all your upcoming songs and tracks.

Organize your tracks

First things first, you need to organize all your tracks into busses; each snare, kick, and mic should have its way to the instrumental bus. Doing so negates the need to repeat your process for each track, and everything will come together as one unit.

Route all the individual busses to the master drum bus channel, change the output of each of your tracks and the input of the aux track as that same bus. This gives you control over the entire set, and any changes made from here onwards will affect the whole group.

Add compression to make your drums sound full

Compression allows you to reduce the gap between your quietest and most prominent audio signals on a track. It makes your drums sound more powerful and fuller.

You can work with actual drums to achieve this or utilize instrumental software like IK Multimedia MODO Drum SE to get a full array of incredibly authentic sound in real-time. However, there are no go-to presets and settings you can turn to achieve a cohesive sound; you’ll need to tweak around and find out what works best for your songs.

Compressors let you control the attack and release levels to specify which drum sounds you want to bring to the forefront. You can then decrease the attack time and engage in a quicker and punchier sound.

Pick the right samples

With instrumental software, you’ll get many options and sound samples, but you need to know what fits with your track. You can pull some pieces into your DAW and view their transients; bigger transients are more impactful and add a heavier flow to your sound.

Adjust the EQ

Before you jump into messing around with the EQ, you need to consider the end product. EQing can give you some really intricate drum sounds that might not always harmonize with the entire track.

For best results, minus the kick and roll off any low-end frequencies. You can also spike up some frequencies to uncover the right keys for your drums and tune. Boost your drum ranges to around 10k for a brighter tone, but don’t cut off your low and mid ranges as they also impact the final products and drum sounds.

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At Recording Software.com, we offer a wide variety of download-only recording and music-producing software to help musicians and producers perfect their sound. Our drums category has many programs and plug-ins you can use to get the perfect head-bopping beats.

For more information, contact us!