Reply To: Krzysztof Skrzypkowski – Dead To The World Mix

Hey Krzysztof,

I suspect you might be compressing your kik too hard. The transient material is extremely prevalent, in addition to the kik being too active around the 1.5K range. (Compressors knock the loud parts down a few pegs, so the quieter parts – in the case of drums parts with more midrange – become more prevalent.)

What I’ve found to be extremely useful to get kikdrums to “pop” in the mix is to either shape the transient of the drum with a gate (with extremely fast attack and release times to induce a kind of pleasant-sounding pop in the transient) and/or compress them with slow attack times. By slow, I mean ~70ms. If you can get it right you’d be surprised to learn how little compression you really need on a drum, kikdrum or otherwise.

With regards to the rest of the mix, the bass guitar also comes to mind. I’d spend some time tweaking the 500-1K range to get it to play ball with the guitar sound.

Snare sounds spot on though – good work there.

Good luck, and take care!