Hi all – can anyone advise on the eq-ing of cymbals especially Crash1 when using the awesome Black Pearl kit from AVL drums?
Otherwise I find that, left untouched, there is a lot of overwhelming midrange to my ears especially from Crash1.
While I’m a complete amateur, I can make things a bit better by messing around with x42-eq. Having said that I would much prefer some objectivity from others with more experience / expertise, such as I suggest a low pass filter at XYZ Hz with ABC etc, etc.
Maybe a multiband compressor could Help? I Had good results with LSP Multiband Compressor. IT Had a good analyzer with which it’s very easy to tame the frequencies that are too much.
I use the Avl drums a lot in my music. The crashes on the black pearl can sound pretty harsh depending on how hard they’re hit.
My first tip would be playing around with the velocity on the crash hit, these kits are multilayered, meaning different samples were recorded for different velocity ranges. In my opinion it’s where the AVL kits shine.
Second, I think it’s very important to give your cymbals some room. I like to send them to my main reverb bus. And I might also have a reverb on the drum bus, before compression, to make em sound a little more real.
Sometimes it can just be the dynamics that are a problem. You can try compressing your whole drum bus or just the cymbals themselves, see if you like the sound better.
I tend to high pass the cymbals on most MIDI kits, I don’t often need them in the mid-range at all and I expect them to fill the upper range of the mix. It’s also a way to emulate what I would do with a real kit’s overhead mics, though in that case it’s to eliminate some of the snare and kick bleed.
I’ve heard some engineers like to use very short delays on MIDI drum cymbals to give them some comb filtering too. maybe that’s worth a shot?
TLDR if it’s just EQ try a gentle highpass around 2k, and move it up and down the frequency range til you like what you hear. Otherwise experiment with taming the dynamics, and try some reverb.
Even with the layered samples that cymbal has a harsh timbre. When I sampled the kit I didn’t have a wealth of cymbals and that cymbal cut through in live situations nicely but under the microscope of being in a sample set it’s not one of my favorites either.
A common mistake in drum programming is people often make the cymbals too loud and that crash sticks out like a sore thumb if programmed too loudly. I often use the other crash for punctuation and will use Crash 1 very quietly for more of a cymbal wash or I will blend with Crash 2 or the Splash to diffuse it a bit. I personally find EQing cymbals to be unsatisfactory most of the time because there is such a huge frequency range between the fundamental tone and all of the high end stuff it often sounds unnatural if EQ’d too much.
Oooh it’s really nice to hear your input about it! Thank you so much for your work. Despite their small quirks the kits are really nice to work with! I love the range of dynamics I can program with them.
If you’re alright with answering a question related to this topic, what was your vision with the Red Zeppelin? It’s the kit I struggle the most to use in my productions, in great part due to the kick’s sound.
Hello Glen! I really appreciate you weighing in here. Your beautifully recorded AVL Drums have been crucial to my Ardour projects, I am so grateful to you for having produced them.
Having said that I’m sure my problem is just EQ. To pick one from a countless number of successful rock songs as a reference: listen to the first 3 seconds of the Pixies Gone to Heaven, and you hear a crash cymbal that sounds to me now (after having spending time trying to mix with raw cymbal recordings) like it could be as simple as a very radical application of a high pass filter with very high cutoff frequency.
It’s just that getting there when starting with any raw crash cymbal recordings and the various knobs and sliders in x42-eq, I feel a bit like trying to play darts with a blindfold on. Maybe some kind soul out there will share some of their knowledge and experience.
That cymbal is there for less than a second, so they are putting a nice short envelope on it, and probably not hitting it very hard, either. As @KookyFox said, studio drummers know not to hit the crash very hard. A little goes a long way.
On top of that cymbals, as simple as they look, are some of the most complex and uniquely voiced instruments you’ll encounter in a studio. When hit the sound they produce is constantly modulated by the metal flexing, wobbling, and how the the resonance from the hit interacts within the metal itself.
There pretty much no real way to make two different cymbals sound the same with just EQ. You might get close-ish, but at that point you could argue that maybe that cymbal is not a fit for the current song.
As @GMaq said crash1 of the Black Pearl was one they felt was useful when trying to cut through in live circumstances. Maybe that’s not the fit for what you’re producing right now. In the case it might be best to either skip using it. Or swap for a cymbal from another kit (The blonde bop has a very nice selection of cymbals).
I’m not sure what kind of music you’re producing but the Red Zeppelin was kind of a ‘happy accident’… It was part Christmas present for my son (then 15 years old) and partly bought with his own savings and it was a special Ludwig anniversary kit in the classic John Bonham (Led Zeppelin drummer) shell size configuration. He was starting to play gigs with his own bands and at the same time we were working on some heavy blues material in the Studio and wanted that Bonham sound. When we got the kit set up in the Studio even though the cheapo factory drum heads usually get chucked we were digging the thunderous sound so we did some quick tuning and recorded them as-is. At some point during those first recording sessions I sampled them and although they were not dead-ringers for the Bonham sound they sounded very big and boomy and that’s why the Red Zeppelin sounds different than your average kit, the drum shells themselves are big and unique… 26" kick, 14" rack and 16" and 18" floor toms.
Here is a song from those sessions as reference to the actual kit in a room:
While much of the character got into the Red Zeppelin drum samples I will admit all of the accidental magic of the kit live in the Studio was hard to put in a bottle and I was pretty inexperienced with sampling techniques so it is what it is… I think they suit a pretty small sonic niche (ie loud blues influenced rock) and I’m not sure how they would fit in more modern types of music. The Blonde Bop is kind of an answer to what the Zeps lack…
Thank you very much for the insight! I don’t have indeed much use for it right now, but I have ideas of what to do with in the future. Also that’s an adorable backstory!
I use all of those kits, especially AV drums, just love how real they sound… Have found the best tool to be the ACE hi/low pass filter to use on each drum/cymbal… I agree with the previous comments that over eq’ing can take away the natural sound, but I use the hi/lo pass to get it sounding nice then reduce the resonance to take away the harshness, works wonders with the kick drum too as am able to get that just right with this tool alone, also it uses hardly any resources so I put it on every drum track…
Dont know what I would do without it anymore…!
Maybe some kind soul out there will share some of their knowledge and experience.