Gating when there's a lot of bleed

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PlatinumAudio

New member
Hi, I've got some drum recordings that have excessive bleed. I've not had much luck gating the kick in a musical manner. The tail of the kick is drowned by snare and cymbals. Are there any tricks to work around this?

For now I've abandoned using a gate and gone with more of an EQ approach.
 
If you qre using a DAW, just edit out all the bleed. You can fade it in any manner you need to.

You can also do sample replacement if it is just unusable.
 
Unfortunately you need to address the bleed issues when recording, the drum kit has to sound good at the recording stage with all the bleed present, then you will find that a small amount of gating may improve things later if required. For example if there is a ton of snare in the kick channel this should have been addressed at the recording stage.

Now if the recording you have can't be re-done, you may be able to save it if you have a gate with frequency filters, or as farview said, edit the spill out.

"The tail of the kick is drowned by snare and cymbals." There is a way to save this by gating the kick really tight so that the tail has gone, then add a small amount of reverb to the kick channel after the gate so that it does not sound cut off.



Alan.
 
Thanks for the suggestions, gents.

The recordings were all done in the band's home studio. I don't want to ask them to re-track anything at this stage.

Might have a play with volume fading the tail and some reverbs. :)






Here are the drums so far. I've gotten a decent kick sound (albeit too bass heavy atm), but the bleed is washing the overheads a bit.
 
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If the kick is your only problem, enhancement with a sample is likely the easiest way.

Send me 1 full length track of just the kick drum. I will send you back 3 different kick samples for the whole track so you can see what SS Trigger can do for you.

Wow, that sounded like I am selling something. lol!

Just willing to help. Will take me 10 minutes. :)
 
Sounds like the harshness of the cymbals is more of an issue to be honest. Hard to say without hearing all of the tracks...

What do you have as far as separate drum tracks?
 
Whatever is pushing the squishy cymbal bleed, might be over compression is part of the problem.
Less squish, less bleed. Maybe less need for a gate?
 
Have you tried feeding the gate a filtered side-chain? It would eliminate the cymbals/snare triggering the gate on the kick.

Seems like a simple question but it'd eliminate the possibility.
 
jimmys69 said:
If the kick is your only problem, enhancement with a sample is likely the easiest way.

Send me 1 full length track of just the kick drum. I will send you back 3 different kick samples for the whole track so you can see what SS Trigger can do for you.

Wow, that sounded like I am selling something. lol!

Just willing to help. Will take me 10 minutes. :)
Click to expand...


this.

ultimately, you have control of the end result.

otherwise, you are chasing your tail trying to deal with something that should have been handled during the recording process.

otherwise,
let it go, and use the bleed as part of your overall mix.
it WILL color the sound of the mix,

and that is the sonic fingerprint you are stuck with, for good or bad.
 
I can't listen right now, but if you use the overheads for the core sound of the kit and just use the spot mics for attack and to fill in a bit, you can get something like this to work. It will be more roomy sounding.
 
Thanks for all the advice! I've put off using sample replacement because of an issue I'm trying to troubleshoot with Drumagog. Will try turning ASIO guard off just for Drumagog and see how I go. It's not detecting audio over the threshold consistently. If I press stop and play again it will usually work fine, but then that stops the MIDI channel recording ...
 
PlatinumAudio said:
Thanks for all the advice! I've put off using sample replacement because of an issue I'm trying to troubleshoot with Drumagog. Will try turning ASIO guard off just for Drumagog and see how I go. It's not detecting audio over the threshold consistently. If I press stop and play again it will usually work fine, but then that stops the MIDI channel recording ...
Click to expand...
Have you contacted Wavemachine Labs, makers of Drumagog? I know those people and they are very responsive.
 
PlatinumAudio said:
Thanks for all the advice! I've put off using sample replacement because of an issue I'm trying to troubleshoot with Drumagog. Will try turning ASIO guard off just for Drumagog and see how I go. It's not detecting audio over the threshold consistently. If I press stop and play again it will usually work fine, but then that stops the MIDI channel recording ...
Click to expand...

I would call it 'enhancement' myself.

Anyway, the offer is still there.

I highly doubt ASIO Guard has anything to do with why Drumagog isn't working. I have no issue with triggering drums with SSTrigger.


So, you a Cubase guy huh?
 
jimmys69 said:
I would call it 'enhancement' myself.

Anyway, the offer is still there.

I highly doubt ASIO Guard has anything to do with why Drumagog isn't working. I have no issue with triggering drums with SSTrigger.


So, you a Cubase guy huh?
Click to expand...

The asio guard thing was suggested by the cubase rep. Haven't got onto drumagog support yet. I've pulled the studio apart while I get some new furniture together. Hopefully be up and running again in a week or two.

Yep, been using cubase since version 2. Before that I used Cakewalk (now Sonar). I have used protools here and there, mostly when working out of other studios. I sometimes miss PT when it comes to mixing, but version 7 of Cubase tidied things up quite a bit in that regard and also added a lot of audio editing and production features. I'm one of those guys who likes everything to be "just so" before I engage my creative side, so the new organisational tracks in 7.5 really help me get all that out of the way a lot faster. I'm still pretty damn slow at using it, but I can see it becoming like a glove.
 
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