Mixing Midi Drums - Everything You Need To Know

Here is my complete break down of how to set up Midi drums for mixing within your DAW, how to adjust your programming for more authenticity and how to process midi drums to get them sounding the very best they can be!
(00:00) Getting Set Up
(05:53) Better Programming
(12:06) Optimising Settings
(18:02) Mixing
(19:40) Drum Bus
(25:44) Kick
(29:33) Snare
(32:27) Toms
(33:57) Overheads
(35:34) Rooms
(39:42) The Mix
(41:47) The Blueprint
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[@fletcher2311]

Spent best part of 15 years trying to make MIDI drums sound like real ones for a living (economies of scale) right back to EXS, Battery and BFD. Hats off to you and your chops! Your viewers can count themselves lucky - this is the best content I've come across on this subject. Keep up the excellent work!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks so much mate! That’s a big compliment!

[@studio42.thelivesessions38]

Man... Studio guy from Germany here... I discovered your channel shortly and have to say a big thank you! You are so much on point to the topic, no bullshit talking half the video, great topics over all... learned a lot of detailed nerdy stuff. I just do not need Prod Like A Pro, marc daniel nelson, kohlekeller, ... and so on and on ANYMORE :) This means a lot! This one here was real great as I produce quite often stuff with programmed drums (XLN Addictive Drums) and i got some nice little ideas here to build it up very nicely. To keep it short: New fan here. Bye

[@spinlightstudios]

Cheers mate! Very appreciative! So glad I can be of help :)

[@Sandesnor2]

Holy shit! This is what I tried to request a while back. You're sick!

[@spinlightstudios]

Haha hopefully you get something helpful out of it!

[@KevinFinkelmeier]

Great video. This will help a ton of people.

[@spinlightstudios]

Cheers Kevin!

[@BrianCharles8682]

Hey man, been using both Slate drums and Slate plugs for a few years and love seeing a new way to mix them. You’ve got some different approaches compared to what’s out there and really simplified it. I wish you had this out 5 years ago. Thanks. I applied some of your ideas (some, not all) to a mix I’ve been working on using SSD and it was like an adrenaline shot to my drums. Thanks man!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks man! Honestly - you can make it as complex or as simple as you like… I find the more complicated you make it - usually worse it starts to sound 😂 glad you enjoyed it!

[@guitarwalljams]

Dude this is the best video on mixing midi drums! I especially love it cause your on Logic like me so makes it even valuable, cheers my man keep up the great content.

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks so much mate! Glad you enjoyed it!

[@officialWWM]

Thanks bro, very helpful. That double kick thing was interesting.

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks mate!

[@craigpollock8714]

Best midi drums mixing vid I have seen in 10 years. Great job mate!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks Craig!

[@akeyzstudio6620]

you are a life saver and this is free wooow been trying to be good with midi drums mixing been really struggling thank you so much

[@spinlightstudios]

Hopefully it helps!

[@AndreiBachmanov]

Thanks for an awesome tutorial! Haha BTW, I was mixing midi drums based on your live drums tutorials and liked the result a lot!

[@spinlightstudios]

It’s all pretty much the same in the end! Just might not need as much processing for midi drums if the library already sounds pretty decent!

[@paydirt_music]

Cheers for this video Rhys, so many awesome tips and done in an easy to follow format. I can't wait to dive into SSD and apply some of this

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks mate!

[@edwardkenemorales]

Thanks for this jam-packed tutorial. Learned a lot! You outdid yourself in this video mate!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks Edward! Stoked you got something out of it!

[@edwardkenemorales]

@@spinlightstudios Definitely! That thing you showed about setting the Drum ADSR before mixing is a gold nugget.

[@nicka5607]

Awesome video just what I needed! Keep up the good work.

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks mate!

[@derekv9710]

Amazing video as always man! Your insight,detail and depth is next level!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks so much mate!

[@looseheatsink]

Hey mate, cheers from North Carolina in the USA. Just discovered your channel (and subscribed!!) this week. Really love this vid and will be checking out your other content as well. Great job.

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks so much mate! Appreciate it!

[@diecinuevemx]

Man! definitely one of the best tutorials I've watched! I love your videos! I learn so much from them! I would like to see a video on how do you program your midi drums and also if you could do a video on MLDrums it'll be awesome! Thank you so much for sharing!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks legend! I’ve been meaning to check out MLDrums! Seems like a video on programming is of interest for a few people!

[@diecinuevemx]

@@spinlightstudios Hey man! It'll be awesome! Also, have you ever had the chance to try Melda Production plugins? They have a bundle of like 30 something plugins for free, I believe it'll also be cool if you could try them out.

[@clintyoung9902]

This is great man. Saved for sure. Maybe do a quick vid for us guitarist on your process for writing in the drum midi and your thought process for drum parts/performance.

[@spinlightstudios]

That’s not a bad idea!

[@Zion.MusicOfficial]

Thanks for this! ❤

[@spinlightstudios]

No problem!

[@EricDoesMusic]

Love your videos, you have a great way of teaching and presenting information. Cheers from Canada!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks Eric 🙏🏼

[@stephenmenor6557]

Hey man this is absolutely amazing! I've been struggling with mixing programmed drums and this is such a huge help. I hope you keep making these in-depth tutorials!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks Stephen! Absolutely! It’s always about time with these longer vids, I had a window of opportunity to get this one done!

[@thelightmonkey1970]

Great vid, thanks - I'm working on this very thing right now!

[@spinlightstudios]

Hopefully it helps a little!

[@musiclearner8634]

Thank you 🙏🏻. You're the best ♥️

[@spinlightstudios]

No problem! Thanks for watching :)

[@joemayerski]

This is an excellent video with a lot of great information. Thanks so much!

[@spinlightstudios]

No problem! Thanks Joe!

[@thutaismakingbeats]

More mixing start to finish video like indie rock song mixing . plz , sir.

[@RyanKnott]

Really outstanding tutorial.

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks Ryan!

[@constantinranis]

Awesome man , thank you for this tutorial, this is my favorite preset from my favorite drum vst, I'm kinda lazy and just process them as a whole kit a lil bit , but I will definitely mix them along with your video for more "serious" projects

[@spinlightstudios]

Haha I hear ya, whatever sounds good and gets the job done!

[@gurumajuindonesia]

Oh yeaah !thank you for this lesson

[@spinlightstudios]

No problem! Thanks for checking it out!

[@gurumajuindonesia]

@@spinlightstudios I am having issue with my connection, is there any possibilities you kindly share the preset of SSD5 instead?

[@audiodemon]

Great video Rhys. One additional thing that is worth mentioning is to record each separate input into the DAW as an audio file. That way you have it for future use, remixing etc incase you end up not having the same Virtual Drum plugin down the road sometime. I do this for any virtual instrument. I learnt this after losing access to plugins that upgraded over the years and my old sessions no longer load the virtual instruments I used.

[@spinlightstudios]

Absolutely! Rendering them down to audio files future-proofs your project - even if it’s something you do once it’s all mixed and completed.

[@burado1974]

I have Addictive Drums but can do the same stuff with that software, some great ideas here and yes I've been processing way too much. Thank you again for another great video!

[@joshuadelaughter7968]

Thank you so much for this. Unfortunately right now I'm constrained to mostly using virtual instruments, and there's so little info out there on how to mix them. Would love a video on virtual rythm guitars as well as I always seem to struggle with those.

[@alessandroconway2531]

Great video thank you!!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks mate!

[@soontaek]

Thank you

[@spinlightstudios]

No problem!

[@Simeon_Harris]

one tip to add some feel to midi drums, is to select all the snare hits and simply move them back behind the beat a little bit. not so good for metal styles like this, but for almost everything else, it's like magic. i've spent days programming midi drum parts in the past and this simple little trick makes such a huge difference. try it - program 4 bars of a simple, perfectly quantised beat and then grab all the snares and budge them back behind the beat a few ticks.

[@spinlightstudios]

Having things not hit 100% in time - like the kick and hihats / snare and hihats would definitely give some realism. Good tip

[@Simeon_Harris]

@@spinlightstudios i normally use the "humanise" function in logic to add some gentle randomness to everything - for velocity and position only - but this snare trick adds "groove" in a way that randomness doesn't. it works especially well on songs that have a very slow tempo. it emulates the way drummers actually play.

[@officialWWM]

@@Simeon_Harristhanks bro. I’m gonna try it.

[@corydhmiller]

Hey legend, great video! Lots of bedroom artists diving more into midi drums which is super cool. I know this is purely for mixing, but a good tip/reminder for musicians programming drums is that quantization is the enemy of realism. You can have a really great mix, but if you're mixing 100% velocity on a 100% perfect alignment, it'll just sound like a drum machine and not a real person. Glad you touched on this in the programming part of the video. If you can't get an e-kit, at the very least invest in some sort of midi pad trigger so you can play it with your hands/fingers and practice to get it close but not perfect. All of the subtleties that get pulled out in the mix really need that humanity to make it actually sound good and not like machine gun hits. Thanks again for your videos mate, keep it up!

[@spinlightstudios]

Some great suggestions! Thanks for your input mate!

[@Dave-Rough-Diamond-Dunn]

Very much needed!

[@spinlightstudios]

Hope it’s helpful!

[@Dave-Rough-Diamond-Dunn]

Yeah, I use MT Power Drums, so what I'm watching you do in the SSD I do with gates and transient designers, but the theory is the same.

[@spinlightstudios]

@@Dave-Rough-Diamond-Dunn exactly, many ways to achieve the same results. The ADSR is basically a transient designer + gate for midi drums. Dependent on whether the library/vst has this feature - if not, yeah you need to use a gate/expander plugin!

[@Dave-Rough-Diamond-Dunn]

​@@spinlightstudiosFinished watching now, and it's reassuring to know that I was on the right track, even down to the room drum eq. I made my own room tracks the other day by playing the drums through the monitors and recording them. It turned out surprisingly well. I went with the two condensers spread apart rather than on top of each other, and a condenser almost at the back of the room over one in the "sweet spot" where I sit to mix. It works much better than some techniques I've tried using eq and reverb.

[@spinlightstudios]

@@Dave-Rough-Diamond-Dunn ooo reamping rooms. That’s cool. Something I have thought about but haven’t tried myself!

[@imDrakos]

thats more than usefull thats awesome , loved it , thx u very much i wish i saw this before dropping my latest release (3 hours before ur vid ) XD unlucky , thx u tho

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks mate! There is always the next release!

[@BrandonWells]

I just picked up your one shot sample pack. supplementing your room shells with the slate kits has things sounding great without even doing any processing on the individual channels

[@spinlightstudios]

Cheers Brandon! Love hearing that!

[@jivetownjimmy]

Excellent. I have an email in my drafts folder to you requesting this video. Great minds!! I can’t wait to dig into this after work. Thanks Rhys!

[@spinlightstudios]

Haha love it!

[@jivetownjimmy]

@@spinlightstudios As predicted this was incredibly helpful. I use ProTools, but I am pretty sure I can figure out how to translate the same kinds of actions from Logic (hopefully there's a similar function like the "strength" option. I know PT has a "swing" function). I recently learned how to convert MIDI drums into a multi-track, but your explanation was so much more clean. The only tweak I would make (and hope for in the future) would be to see you do this for a less-involved alt-country/Americana/Heartland Rock song to see how your approach to the processing of the drums (and them EQ/compression/dynamics strip) would change. I get a LOT out of seeing how you choose and use plugins to get the sound that fits the musical style. Thanks again, ya Legend!

[@Dirk_Ehlert]

YESSS

[@spinlightstudios]

🙏🏼🙏🏼🙏🏼

[@cheatingatmath3722]

I record demos for my bands and my friends' bands, and my thing is I use my nice acoustic/electric conversion e-kit to trigger Superior Drummer 3. Real drum feel, real drummer, easy edits. Between that, the Suhr Reactive Loads I use on guitars, and the DI's/Darkglass for bass, I can record a balls out hardcore band you can't hear a thing in the next room.

[@spinlightstudios]

Silent hardcore 😝 it’s pretty funny how you can create LOUD music without being loud 😂

[@ashthereverseflash]

This was a great video to catch on my algorithm! For my mixing journey! Definitely subscribing. I don’t know if you have made a video about this or not, but I’m aware of when mixing bass guitar people tend to do a di then a low bass and and hi end bass layered, and is that even necessary? I got the guitars mixing down, practicing drums now, but I’m at lost for the bass, specially when I never knew people did 3 bass layered tracks until recently, if possible can you point me to a video that describes that !? Or hoping your next video is a full bass guitar mix breakdown! Cheers!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks Man! There’s no one way to do it with bass. Usually I blend two a di and a more processed signal together - or a clean and a dirty signal to taste. I’ve got a video on some bass mixing - not sure how to link you to it. Maybe just search “Spinlight studio bass” and see what turns up haha

[@fevgatos]

I would actually pay to see you re-creating Weezer drum-sound from Pinkerton with SSD!

[@steveweilhart2359]

like your moves sounds great - I use superior drums for my stuff I like to convert the midi to audio tracks then start the process - it's more like you recorded real drums I think the results are better -

[@marioaguilera9463]

Awesome! I am a big fan of toontrack SD3, I confess I hate SSD5 for the cymbals, they just aren't in the spot as SD3, but man!!.... these drums sound killer!!! you're a genius!!!

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks Mario. Cymbals are always the weakness of midi drums! I’ve found Superior drummer cymbals pretty good, but the hihats sounds a little funny to me!

[@hellaslayin7175]

Great vid! Didn't you have the cymbals going into the parallel when you left the rack on the mix bus though? I always thought parallel is for shells only.

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks! Yeah I had the whole kit in parallel and sounded good! There’s no one rule for that stuff. Sure I usually have a parallel send which is just shells, but sometimes like in this example it works to just keep it simple. Also the midi drums allow us to control the amount of cymbals to shells ratio very easily, so my blend was already more shells heavy, meaning the cymbals didn’t jump out in a bad way after the parallel comp :)

[@BukanIbuMu]

Thank you for this awesome tutorial. Is there any reason not to use a higher sidechain hp filter like 150hz? 24:34

[@spinlightstudios]

It just depends how you want the compressor to react. 150hz is going to let a lot more low end pass through the detector before it starts compressing - if you want to have more low end in your drums then that will help. The harder you compress the more you will notice the difference too. It’s all just a matter of taste

[@BigBadMadden95]

My tip for programming midi is to learn to air drum or tap it out on your legs or something. Gives you a way better idea on how hard everything would be hit, also if it's even possible to play

[@spinlightstudios]

Haha exactly - I have done session drums on songs guitarists have written and I had to magically grow a third arm 😂

[@SargentD22]

Something I tend to struggle with is I guess where things should be panned within SSD. Is there any advice or settings as far as where things should sit in a mix as far as the crashes and toms?

[@MunkirNakirGaming]

😂😂😂❤❤❤ thank you for this video sir

[@spinlightstudios]

No worries mate!

[@RolandDeschain1]

I just bought a course on learning how to program MIDI drums. I'm wondering if it's worth getting a dedicated MIDI controller, either keyboard or pads

[@spinlightstudios]

Depends if you want to play it in, I’ve never been much of a keyboard drummer haha I just manually do it. But if you’re playing keys parts and lots of different sounds, it’s absolutely worth getting a midi keyboard.

[@giannispan8129]

Which DAW is considered the best and do you recommend for recording MIDI processing?

[@spinlightstudios]

I don’t think any DAW is considered the best - you will only get biased opinions of the DAW people use 😂 logic is great with midi if that helps!

[@risingphoenix1484]

Question what desk are you using?

[@spinlightstudios]

Just a custom one I built with my father ☺️

[@davidr1620]

I use Luna and they STILL don’t have multi out. No wonder I “hated” the slate drums. Without a total pain in the ass process of separating the tracks, it’s so difficult to make them sound real and fit into a mix.

[@spinlightstudios]

That’s interesting. There’s so many factors to making midi drums work imo. I usually just record drums tbh 😂 but I can still make them work when I need to. Is that Steven slates problem or Lunas problem? Seems more like a daw issue? But pretty much any midi drum library requires separating them out into individual channels - from my experience anyway 🤷‍♂️

[@davidr1620]

@@spinlightstudios that’s what I mean. It’s not SSD5’s problem. You just can’t process it the way it needs to be. There’s no way they can make stock drums sound perfect in every mix. UA just needs to get its shit together with Luna.

[@spinlightstudios]

@@davidr1620 ah that’s frustrating man! UA need to sort that!

[@sachii.k1802]

Still waiting for a hip hop with vocal tutorial please :)

[@spinlightstudios]

I hear ya! I’ll see what I can dig up from my projects!

[@sachii.k1802]

@@spinlightstudios ma man! 🤟

[@DrProgNerd]

This was awesome, Rhys. I'm going to go back and watch it again - and again. Lol !! Love the 'top-down from the bus' move. WAY more economical. I was already using a Distressor plugin on my drum bus - but wasn't following it up with another compressor to glue it. Love that. *Question for any Superior Drummer 3 users* : I'm not finding an ADSR section in SD3. Is it in there - and I'm missing it - *or* - is there but called something else? Hate the long ring of the toms. I can cut a lot of it with a gate and compressor - but it would be so much easier if the UI was more like Slate. Out of a long history of great videos, Rhys, this is absolutely my favorite one you've ever done. Thank you for doing this.

[@spinlightstudios]

Thanks mate! I recall on SD2 they had an “enveloper” maybe 🤔 but I could do the same thing - surely SD3 has something like this. If not - an expander/gate would do the trick. Glad you enjoyed this video!

[@NoelCruzSings]

If I Can't Love Her, Beauty and the Beast

[@emretemel671]

Bfd 3 is the most realistic midi drum

[@spinlightstudios]

Heard great things about BF3