
PhilGood
Juice box hero
Interesting little trick I discovered and thought I'd share it and see if it helps anyone.
I’m trying to get a really thick, personal sound on some country tunes I'm working on, but there is some bleed coming in (maybe from bad tuning or something) It seems as though some of the mics pick up too much ambience, especially on the snare. I am using LDC’s on toms with a –15dB pad engaged, a 57 on snare, a nice kick mic (using the paint can technique) and a set of x/y overheads. Something is picking up too much ambience of the room and I’m thinking it’s the overheads or maybe the tom LDC’s (I have 5). It picks up too much of the snare ring and does not sound thick. Should I give up the overheads in x/y and try for a left side/right side overhead technique? In my mind that would capture more punch, but I always worry about phase problems, which is why I went back to x/y. I heard about putting the top snare mic out of phase and thought about trying it.
I was playing around with the original recording and found that the source of my irritation was from the snare bleed in the toms mics. Yech! So I was messing around and decided to try some echo on the snare. I discovered that if I added a 25-35 millisecond single slap delay mixed in at under 20% it did an interesting thing. It causes the echo to be out of phase with the snare pickup in the tom mics. Just the snare, not the toms. You don’t hear the echo on the snare because it’s cancelled by the tom mics, and the tom mics no longer ‘hear’ the snare. All the punch came right back. Bang!
YMMV.
I’m trying to get a really thick, personal sound on some country tunes I'm working on, but there is some bleed coming in (maybe from bad tuning or something) It seems as though some of the mics pick up too much ambience, especially on the snare. I am using LDC’s on toms with a –15dB pad engaged, a 57 on snare, a nice kick mic (using the paint can technique) and a set of x/y overheads. Something is picking up too much ambience of the room and I’m thinking it’s the overheads or maybe the tom LDC’s (I have 5). It picks up too much of the snare ring and does not sound thick. Should I give up the overheads in x/y and try for a left side/right side overhead technique? In my mind that would capture more punch, but I always worry about phase problems, which is why I went back to x/y. I heard about putting the top snare mic out of phase and thought about trying it.
I was playing around with the original recording and found that the source of my irritation was from the snare bleed in the toms mics. Yech! So I was messing around and decided to try some echo on the snare. I discovered that if I added a 25-35 millisecond single slap delay mixed in at under 20% it did an interesting thing. It causes the echo to be out of phase with the snare pickup in the tom mics. Just the snare, not the toms. You don’t hear the echo on the snare because it’s cancelled by the tom mics, and the tom mics no longer ‘hear’ the snare. All the punch came right back. Bang!
YMMV.
