How To Phase Align Drums: The Ultimate Guide
- drumaudioediting
- Jun 7
- 7 min read
You may have heared the phrases 'in phase' and 'out of phase' knocking around online when researching drum editing or mixing resources. If you're working on your own music and want to elevate your drum sound to the highest level, it's vital that you know how to phase align drums.
In this article we give you all the information you'll need to know on how to phase align drums in any DAW, whether it's Cubase, Logic Pro X or Pro Tools. Not only that, we go into the details of what phase alignment is and why it's so important for your mix.
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What Is Phase Alignment And Why Does It Matter?
When you’re recording drums (or any instrument for that matter) with multiple microphones, you’re capturing the same sounds — like a snare hit or kick thump — from different angles and distances. This is either done intentionally, such as by using a snare top/snare bottom recording setup, or accidently due to microphone bleed.
This is a totally normal byproduct of recording drums. But if those mics aren’t nearly perfectly aligned in time, things can start to sound strange (we'll get onto that nearly later). This is what we call being 'out of phase'. In simple terms, phase issues happen when the same sound wave is hitting two mics at slightly different times.
When you zoom in on the tracks in your DAW, the waveforms will most likely be slightly out of time with one-another. For example, the snare waveform on the snare top mic track will appear slightly before the snare waveform that is captured in the overheads. That's because the snare (the sound source) is physically closer to the snare top microphone than the overhead microphone, so the sound reaches that microphone first.
These tracks being too far out of phase with one another can lead to the drums becoming thin, hollow, or just downright weak. This is due to the effect of phase cancellation, where the waveforms clash and cancel out one another, resulting in a loss of volume and frequency content.
You can test the theory of phase cancellation by duplicating a track and then phase inverting one of them. Phase inverting flips the peaks/troughs of the waveform around, causing both tracks to totally cancel each other out, resulting in total silence. This mimics the kind of effect you will get if the tracks are 180 degrees ou of phase with each other. See the diagram below for a visual of this.
You’ll most often hear phase issues between overheads and close mics, or between top and bottom snare mics. It’s like your drums are fighting against themselves — all the energy gets cancelled out instead of boosted.
Other symptoms of drastically out of phase drums include flamming effects on shells (sounds like the drum is being hit twice in quick succession) and wash-y, unpleasant sounding cymbals. These severe issues are most commonly caused by editing your drum mic tracks independently, without grouping them.
When you cut and move any of the drum mic tracks during editing, the same movements must be done to every single track, every single time. That's why drum editing can be tricky and time consuming.
Ever wondered what a phaser effect plugin or guitar pedal does to achieve the sweeping sound that it does? It duplicates the guitar signal and moves it out of phase with the original. This is why you should also edit your guitar DI and amp microphone tracks as a group, if they have been recorded simultaneously!
The good news about phase issues? They're easy to fix once you know what to look and listen for. Phase alignment is one of the first things I tackle in any drum editing session — because tight, punchy drums start with all your mics playing nicely together.
The Danger Of Phase Aligning Drums Too Perfectly
Before we go into the tutorial - just a quick heads up. While phase aligning drum tracks will dramatically improve punch and clarity, doing it too perfectly can actually backfire — especially on more natural or live-feeling recordings.
One of the biggest risks is making everything feel a little too clinical. When you time-align every waveform down to the millisecond, you can end up stripping the performance of its natural depth and stereo image. Overheads and room mics are meant to capture space, not just be time-aligned duplicates of the close mics. If you force them too tightly into phase with your close mics, you risk collapsing the sense of dimension in the kit.
Another issue is that drums don’t all exist in the same physical space — your snare, toms, and cymbals all arrive at microphones at slightly different times for a reason. Over-correcting can create a phase mono-blob effect, where everything sounds flat and squashed together rather than open and energetic.
So while phase alignment is a critical step in any drum edit, it’s important to know it's not about lining everything up perfectly — it’s about making smart choices to preserve the feel and power of the original performance. Trust your ears more than your eyes
How To Phase Align Drums Tutorial
To sum up the process of phase aligning your drums, we want to align all the close mic tracks, such as the kick, snare, toms, hi-hat to the overhead track(s). Assuming that you have recorded your overheads in stereo with a left and right microphone, the first step is to ensure these are phase aligned to the snare first.
Due to the awkward nature of overheads, they can only be phase aligned in context to one element of the kit - because the kick, snare and toms are all in different physcial locations and all reach either overhead microphone at different times. So once you phase align them to one shell, they will go out of phase with the other shells. Confusing, I know.
Due to the snare being arguably the most integral aspect of the kit in terms of the mix; and the drum shell that the overheads will likely be used to enhance the most, we will phase align both overheads using the snare as a reference.
So we first need to find a single snare hit which has a healthy signal in both overhead tracks. We then want to line up the transient of this hit on both tracks so they match each other. If the recording engineer has done a great job by making sure each overhead mic is the same distance away from the centre of the snare then these will already be in phase.
Now that the overheads are in phase with each other, it's time to go through your close mic tracks one-by-one and phase align them using the overhead tracks as your reference point. The key to doing this easily and accurately is to find the cleanest hit of that particular close mic in the song, preferably with the least noise possible.
So for context, we're going to be phase aligning the kick drum first. Ideally, there will be a part of the performance where just the kick drum is hit and nothing else. This is so when we reference the kick drum to the overhead track, we have a noise-free waveform where we can easily identify the transient (beginning) of the hit as clearly as possible.
Next, onto the snare tracks, which there are two tracks for; a snare top and a snare bottom microphone. We use the same process as previous, by finding the clearest snare hit/signal as possible in the overhead tracks and lining up the transient of the same signal in both snare mics.
After doing this though, we have encountered an issue. Despite the transients being lined up, it looks like the waveform on the snare bottom track is in the wrong orientation. This is a common occurrence with this kind of microphone setup and if left untreated, will causea near-catastrophic effects to your snare sound. This can also happen with a 'kick in' and 'kick out' recording setup.
Referring to our earlier point, these snare tracks are now both 180 degrees out of phase with each other, so the phase cancellation is going to be at it's highest potential, resullting in the weakest snare sound you can get out of this situation.
This is very easily fixable though. For the track that is 'flipped upside down', you simply want to select it and apply the phase invert tool to it in your DAW. This should be very easy to find, as it's a common tool that every audio editing software and DAW has.
In Pro Tools, go to Audiosuite > Other > Invert. Once the plug-in is open, select the audio file you want to phase invert and then click 'Render'.
Voi-la, the snare tracks are now in phase!
Simply rinse and repeat the same process for all the close mic tracks and eventually you will have an phase accurate set of drums reach to edit or mix. Ensure that once your drums are phase aligned to do the following:
Add ALL of the drum tracks to a group so they are locked together and can't be moved or edited independently from each other. This prevents them from being dragged out of phase from each other again.
Cut the tracks as a group at the silence at the beginning of the song and delete the audio before the cut. This makes sure that if you export these drums to be reimported at a later date, they all start at the same time and maintain the phase alginment work you have done.
Final Note: Should I Phase Align Room Mics?
It depends on who you ask. Some mixing engineers prefer to phase align the room mic to the overheads, also using the snare as a reference point - some prefer to keep them untouched to maintain an extra bit of depth and space in the overall captured drum sound.
Interestly though, you can manipulate the phase alignment of the room mic in relation to the rest of the tracks to achieve a particular drum sound that you're going for.
Say that we start off with the room mic aligned to the overheads and the rest of the tracks, using the snare as reference and call that our baseline - this is phase aligned. This will achieve the most one-dimentional and 'tight' sound you can get without muting the room mic track altogether.
You can then experiment with moving the room mic track later and later one tiny nudge at a time. You will notice the sound will gradually become more ambient and open. Don't go too far though, or you'll risk creating a washed out or flamming effect.
If this article helped you, you’ll love the complete PDF — 10 Essential Drum Editing Hacks. Packed with workflow fixes and editing tricks that save hours.
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