From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

Make your drums fills more dynamic - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Audio Mixing Master Class

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Make your drums fills more dynamic

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- [Instructor] The drums are the heartbeat of the song, but sometimes they need a little help lifting the song's intensity in just the right places. Here's an automation trick that I call the Dynamic Drum Fills trick. It's going to help the feel of a track without the listener even knowing why. So the first thing we'll do is we'll listen to the song and it's right at the end of the first verse going into the chorus. And listen to the drum fill and what happens. ("Every Day Is A Gift" by Patricia Bahia) That sounded okay, but we can actually make this sound a whole lot better and a lot more exciting. And the first thing I'm going to do is zoom in here and this is the subgroup for the drums. And there's a lot of drum tracks here, but this is the subgroup and everything runs through it. And this is what we're going to automate. So the first thing I'm going to do is put my automation in to Touch. And what this means is, the automation only kicks in when I touch the fader. Then when I release the touch on the fader the automation stops. So here we go, now watch when I automate this. ("Every Day Is A Gift" by Patricia Bahia) 'Kay, let's listen. ("Every Day Is A Gift" by Patricia Bahia) Now you can hear, that's a lot more exciting. Let's listen to the first one. Turn the automation off, and let me zoom out. Again, this is the fader right here. This is without the automation. ("Every Day Is A Gift" by Patricia Bahia) And here's with the automation on. ("Every Day Is A Gift" by Patricia Bahia) And you can hear, that's a lot more exciting. Because, not only do we hear the drum fill a whole lot better, but we also just get the feel of intensity. The intensity rises there, and that's just what we want. To summarize, the Dynamic Drum Fills trick, first thing is to find the sections in the song that you think need to be emphasized. These can be drum fills, they could be accents, or they can be down beats of a section. The next thing is to group the drums or add a subgroup. That means if you're grouping them, just one fader is going to control all the faders in the group and if it's a subgroup it's a separate subgroup that you could EQ separately, you can add compression and processing, whatever. Now, just remember that it doesn't only have to be the drums. You could add the bass in there as well or any other parts that you need. And in fact, this doesn't have to be the drums, it could be just certain parts that need to be emphasized. The next this is to place the automation in Touch mode. Touch mode means it's only writing when you touch the fader. And this is either touching with your finger on a console or a controller, or touching it with the mouse. And finally, raise the fader level for the fill or accent or whatever section that you want to emphasize. Once again, just remember that you can use this with any other instruments or the entire mix. It doesn't have to be relegated to only the drums. This works for just about anything that needs to be emphasized for just a small point in time in the mix.

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