Attenuating other drums from kick drum mic

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Buddyrich
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Attenuating other drums from kick drum mic

Post by Buddyrich » Mon Nov 16, 2015 12:21 pm

Hello, i am new.

Could anyone offer advice on removing unwanted sounds from kick drum mics? I recorded a kit recently and luckily the client and i are happy with the results, although there is a lot of bleed from the whole kit on the front k/drum mic and a lot of under-snare noise on the rear kick mic. During recording I positioned the mics as best i could in terms of the sound i want versus excessive bleed.

As it is, the bleed isn't really affecting the sound and I have no need to compress either mic. But it did make me wonder how i would have tackled the bleed if it had been necessary to try and remove it.

I have messed around with side chaining a compressor (im working in cubase 8) but couldnt really get it to work.

Any ideas (apart from gating which sometimes sounds too weird)?

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Gregg Juke
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Post by Gregg Juke » Mon Nov 16, 2015 1:37 pm

Wow. Love your work. "West Side Story Suite" and "The Roar of '74" used to get a lot of play back in the day...

Anyway, to your question, Buddy, noise gates are funny things that need some real smoodging to sound near right, in my humble experience, but a lot of folks do gate drums, including kicks. But mike choice and placement are important too. And me, I'd dump the under-snare microphone; never did much for me (although I know some here swear by it). But what mikes were you using? That can have a major effect on the recorded sound and the "bleed" issues.

Now, my question to you is, on that Metronome All-Stars thing in '47 ("Leap Here"), you had a really nice sound on the snare with the brushes on the intro. I know it's the eternal question, but did you play that "snares on," or "snares off?"

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Post by Buddyrich » Mon Nov 16, 2015 1:45 pm

Lose the fuckin beard and i'll tell ya smartass! (obscure bus tapes reference)



D112s on front and back of kick. Just to clarify, the whole kit, particularly cymbals, bleed a lot on the front mic, and the sound of the underside of the snare intrudes on the rear kick mic.

Like i said, im happy with my placement choices and the kit sounds great, no processing required at all, just a bit of eq cutting here and there. Just wondered if anyone had any experience using either a side chained compressor or perhaps an expander to deal with bleed.

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Post by Jarvis » Mon Nov 16, 2015 2:00 pm

Love that video where to end your solo you wound up rolling on your own sticks.
Also, gates
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losthighway
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Post by losthighway » Mon Nov 16, 2015 2:23 pm

If you're going for a pretty "modern" kick sound a lot of aggressive eq'ing can happen, mids get scooped out which cuts a lot of the other drums.

The other thing I like with gates, at least with my Drawmer, is you can have the gate reduce however many decibels you like when the gate is closed (not just silence), sometimes dropping the volume 10db gets something out of the way, and draws less attention to the gate.

Also you can key it off of a track that you slide a couple ms before the actual kick sound. This helps if it's coming in late.

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Post by Buddyrich » Mon Nov 16, 2015 2:32 pm

Cool, thanks for your suggestions

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Post by Recycled_Brains » Mon Nov 16, 2015 2:42 pm

You could trigger the kick and snare on separate tracks and use those perfectly consistent tracks to feed the side chain on a gate plugin that you apply to the natural tracks with the bleed that you don't want... that way you get consistent gating with no mis-fires, etc. Probably give you more flexibility with the attack/release controls.

Expanders are cool too. You don't get silence between the hits, but you can knock it down a few pegs.

I hate software gates. Always mis-firing. There are workarounds, but it's annoying. I almost always manual gate toms if it's loud stuff.
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losthighway
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Post by losthighway » Mon Nov 16, 2015 3:39 pm

Recycled_Brains wrote:
I hate software gates. Always mis-firing. There are workarounds, but it's annoying. I almost always manual gate toms if it's loud stuff.
Yeah, for most guys I don't even bother to set up the hardware/plugin. Most people play toms rarely enough that it's actually faster to just set up volume edits in the box/ride a fader outta the box.

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Post by Injured Ear » Mon Nov 16, 2015 3:49 pm

Also consider draping a packing blanket over the bass drum and the microphone & stand during tracking to physically keep the sound of the rest of the kit out of the mic.

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Post by joninc » Mon Nov 16, 2015 5:34 pm

steve albini has a trick for this - he likes to mic the beater side and triggers the gate on that mic via the snare i think. google it...
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Post by cgarges » Mon Nov 23, 2015 1:39 pm

I'm not a member of the Buddy Rich Big Band or the "House Of David Fucking Baseball Team," but here are my two cents:

I've never gotten much of any kind of isolation from what people call a "front of kick" mic (a foot or several out from the drum). If I have some version of a mic inside and a mic outside, close to the front head, I'll get less other stuff in the "inside" mic, but there's no way that I'm gonna be adding any top end EQ to the outside mic without creating a whole new set of phase relationships with the cymbals and snare. Hi hats included. I just try as hard as I can to get that mic sounding the way I want when I record it, so that I don't have to mess up other things later on when I'm trying to "correct" the outside bass drum mic.

I don't have too much issue with an inside bass drum mic (and these days, probably 75% of the time, it's just a mic right inside the hole of the drum, if there is a hole in the drum), unless the drummer is playing the kick drum really lightly.

With a batter-side mic, there's pretty much always bottom snare in it. You can do the slicko Albini ducking thing and that can work pretty well. It makes the batter-side mic sound pretty weird by itself, but sneaking a little of it in can help add definition to the bass drum sound. Mind you, it's "definition" in the way that Albini's bass drum sounds have definition, not in the way that a Sevendust album's bass drum sounds have definition.

Lately, I've been just kind of sticking one mic somewhere down there to get a combination of bass drum definition and snare drum bottom. I find that I can mess with this mic a bit more and get something that's more useful and pleasing, in general. I'm usually using an omnidirectional dynamic mic, like an EV635A, if it just has to be some kind of brighter noise, or a Beyer M101 if it needs to be a bit more "hi fi."

The packing blanket over the bass drum thing can work really well (I did it on a session yesterday), but it's got to be a really heavy blanket and it's got to drape all the way to the ground. I like to use a packing blanket folded once (for two layers) and I put two additional short mic stands on either side of the "real" mic stand to hold the blanket out. I might then put an additional blanket over the front of the first blanket, just to really seal up the from of the drum. This works even better without a front head on the bass drum.

Hope this helps!

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Post by Drone » Mon Nov 23, 2015 3:53 pm

The good things about in the box gates, is that you can make them open before they are triggered, thus losing the nasty clipped off attack.

In the real world gates can't go back in time. :mrgreen:
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Post by cgarges » Mon Nov 23, 2015 4:02 pm

BUT some hardware gates (like the more involved dbx ones) do have "look ahead" feature, which is basically a delay between the key input signal and the audio path. The bummer about this is that on drums, for instance, a delay in the audio path will mess with the phase of the toms. Just something to be aware of.

Also, I just picked up the DMG Expurgate plug-in and that thing is astoundingly good!

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Gregg Juke
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Post by Gregg Juke » Mon Nov 23, 2015 6:20 pm

Actually, on the packing blanket thing, if you're going to go all-out on that, maybe you'd want to try the "bass drum tunnel," if you've got an extra drum around. That can work real well too.

GJ
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Post by A.David.MacKinnon » Mon Nov 23, 2015 6:24 pm

Again on the packing blanket thing - if you're working on the cheap and don't have packing blankets couch cushions do a remarkably good job. You can also avoid using mic stands as props because the cushions are usually stiff enough to stand and stack. Build a little house around the front of the kick and away you go.

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