I am going to be giving out some music mixing tips and recording tips which will improve all of your recording and mixing a lot and get you on your way to learning the best way to produce music and how to make things in your song sound like you need them to.

Making a programmed drum kit sound like a genuine drum kit could be a little of a chore but not when you put a touch of common sense into play and begin to exercise your music mixing strategies you'll catch on pretty swiftly.

A live drum kit sound is what we are looking out for therefore the very first thing we must do is pan the drum set up to mimic how a drum kit would be arranged. Then a drum kit would naturally be playing in one room at one previous point, so we send all the drums to the same bus channel with a reverb unit on it.

You might want to send the bass drum to its own bus channel to cut out a boomy sound that may come from adding reverb to a bass / kick drum that would not normally be influenced by reverb when being recorded. Also send another snare hit to a different channel as the snare would be mic above and below typically and the mic below would get more bass and thus would hard be affected by reverb.

I might suggest the following panning settings, you can change the amounts at which the drums are panned but I'd counsel you keep space between each panned hit to keep the sense of space and realism.

Right or left means the direction you must pan the drum track to and the number in brackets is the amount you need to turn it by.