Bleeding drums / weeping gutars

A

Atipp

New member
We recorded our first song the other night (garage band, garage recording) We miked the drums w/5 mics (Snare, bass, 3 for toms/cymbals...It worked nicely). then stereo out to 2 channels of the 8 track. sounded awsome. miked a guitar, recorded all that to a total of 4 track, and , together, it sounded pretty impressive. The problem is this. Bleeding everywhere. I know this isn't a first. If we put a barrier around the drums (carpet, etc..) we should greatly cut down the guitar-drum bleeding, but what about bleeding between mike drums. There are 5 of them remember and each one picks up a little of everything. Is that normally done like that, or should we shoot for more isolation between each drum mike, and if so How?

Thanks
 
Don’t drive yourself nuts with trying to cut down on bleed; bleed is natural when recording drums. The best way to MINIMIZE the bleed between drums is to utilize the microphones natural polar pattern and frequency response (both on axis and off axis).
The main thing here is can you properly mix the drums????? i.e. if your snare mic is also picking up the high hats is the hi hat signal less than half the volume of the snare. By using some creative mic placement you can cut the bleed between the two but not eliminate it.
AS A GENERAL RULE BLEED MUST SOUND NATURAL, for example if you are doing a live off the floor recording and you have some bass bleeding into the guitar tracks its okay if the bass sounds like "The bass", but lets say the bass sounds like a low rumble that’s incoherent to the ear then that’s a problem. Ya’ll see what I mean. IF bleed is sounding very unnatural and can not be changed via mic placement use an omni mic because it doesn’t reject frequencies from various angels therefore the off axis bleed will sound natural.

Hope this helps a bit :)
Jeff
Saunavation Audio Productions
 
I find it helps if you regard the kit as one instrument - not a collection of different ones. There's no way you can mic a kit with no spill at all, and I find that gating makes the whole thing sound artificial.

The technique I'm using now (I think it was Harvey who suggested it) is to get the main body of the kit sound from the overheads and then to use the "spot" mics to add focus and definition. As long as you've got a decent kit, then it works great.

I've refined it to five mics...

overheads - 2x ECM8000 (one either side of the kit, pretty close to the cymbals)
Snare - SM57 (pointed to the physical center of the drum @ 45 degrees)
B/D - AT Pro 25 (No front head - 3inches from back head)
Hat - ATM 31a (3inches from top hat when fully open @ 90 degrees, about 2 inches in from edge).
 
The trick used for live drums and often in the studio is to put a Noise Gate on each mic. That way the mics will cut off when they are not wanted.

Usually you would do that in the mix but if you are sub mixing your drums to 2 track then you would want to do it while tracking. Behringer makes some cheap, decent multi channel gates.
 
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