Smoothing out OH's/cymbals

[kingtoad]

Another thing you could try is a sort of manual gating - turn down the overheads and duplicate them a couple of times, then make one track the "snare" OH track and the other the "toms" OH track or whatever, and cut out just the sections where those parts of the kit are hit. You can then process sperately for impact or punch or resonance or whatever.

Listen to the last but one Black Keys album (I think) - most, or least a lot of, the drums on that record were recorded with just one mic. When they sent it to Tchad Blake to mix it he did something similar to the above to create de facto kick, snare, whatever tracks.

There are no rules!

[vvv]

I frequently do that!

Just yesterday I iso'd snare hits on a "B"-part where they weren't loud enough by using gates and a little hands-on silencing; I then smashed the track and added a plate, and ended up with a powerful chorus.

[MisterMark]

When I'm in that situation my first inclination is to just turn the OH's down, especially if you are using other room mics... those damn cymbals seem to get into everything. But I like Joel's idea of making them super bright and really turning them down. Better yet, I think I just like the idea that his approach is counter-intuitive.

Also, if it's really problematic I'll use a multi-band compressor and just target compress the small range of frequencies that jump out when the cymbals are hit. For the most part it keeps the rest of the kit sounding real while smoothing out the brashness.

-Mark

[Ken96]

Thanks, all! I tried every suggestion!

I ended up running one of the OH's (snare side) through a de-esser very lightly. I ended up putting a few notch filters in, around 300 and 900 and then ran it through an old Ampex 1/4" reel-to-reel- I didn't even have a reel in, I just ran the signal through and then out into my compressor, trying the suggested slow attack. I'm not happy (are we ever?) but it's now listenable. I found that the snare mic was picking up a lot of cymbal attack, so I eq'd out as much snare as I could from a doubled track, and mixed that all together. I'll try to post a before and after clip soon.

[bobschwenkler]

Maybe an obvious one, but is the snare gate-able?

[triviul]

Looks like the boat's already departed on that particular mix, but my instinct is that if EQ, compression, and re-amping aren't doing the trick, then they're probably the wrong tools for that specific job. My first guess would also have been EQ notches, as low-budget condensers can often cause those kinds of problems in the HF region, but as you've tried that, I'm assuming that's not the whole story. In which case, I'd hazard two other guesses.

It might be uncontrolled HF transients. Those can sound nasty and harsh, even if the tone is dulled with EQ. High-frequency-specific limiting or (even better) threshold-independent transient reduction is where I'd go to tackle that. (There are some affordable plug-in recommendations for these processes here if you fancy toying with them and don't currently have something suitable on hand gear-wise.)

It also might be some kind of localised unmusical distortion, but this is a whole lot trickier to take out after the fact. One tactic might be to low-pass filter the overheads and then resynthesise a slightly better-controlled HF component with an exciter plug-in, but that's pretty drastic. Another completely off-the-wall tactic would be to buss all the drums through a pitch-shifting algorithm (bear with me!) set to do only a couple of cents of shift, perhaps up and then down again. Pitch shifters tend to have more trouble processing things like distortion than in dealing with other aspects of the sound, which in normal circumstances is an undesirable side-effect, but in this case might just help out. Be careful to check that the transients don't suffer unduly in the process, though. You might be able to get away with processing just the overheads in this way, but the phase changes may prove unworkable.