Complicated question about hi-hats and gates

I

Inoasatana

New member
I am about a year into my home recording experience and I opted to mix my band's newest album. The way I am going about it is a little different because my gear is a bit unorthodox and I have to work with what I have.

The tracks were recorded to a Zoom r-16 and from there, I dumped them into Audacity for editing. I do not have a gate plugin and therefore foolishly decided to edit kick, snare, rack and floor manually. This took weeks!

Now that everything is ready for mixing, I have dumped my tracks into my Tascam dp24sd and started with my compression, reverb and levels. Once I started this step, I realized that we never mic'd up the hi-hat! We mic'd the drums: kick, snare, rack, floor, (R) Overhead and (L) Overhead.

My question is: now that I have already edited out any usable hi-hat from the snare mix, how should I EQ the overhead to make the hi-hat present without making the crash too bright?
 
Hi hat is notoriously loud anyway so unless it's a featured part I would just leave the amount you have left in the overheads. It should be loud enough. Just act like you planned it to be understated and everyone will think it's genius. Seriously, I would get my mix balanced first before I worried about it, you may actually find there isn't an issue when all is said and done.
 
I understand you put a lot of time into your editing but was it destructive editing?
If not, I'd pull the original snare track and run with it.

On the other hand, the hats present enough as-is in the over heads and, if not, it shouldn't be too hard to find the right spot to boost eq slightly to accentuate them.
As Gtoboy says, if anything's going to be too loud its usually the hats.
 
Start by getting something a bit more user friendly and capable than Audacity...it will make your editing easier and faster.

Like others have said...a high hat is like a bug in the room that you want to get rid of most times, rather than make use of, and if you put up OH mics, there's probably more than enough there already, but it's probably a bit too "roomy" sounding if you need it to be crisp and dry...so you should be able to pull up the original drums on another track and edit again for the hat without messing with the tracks you already edited.

Also not sure why it's a problem that you "don't have a gate plugin"...?
I mean...you don't need to gate/edit the shit out of everything in-between every hit on every drum.
Drums are a complete instrument...and it's not necessary to gate/edit them in that manner. Let them breathe...
It would be like gating out everything in-between every guitar note...etc.
 
"Start by getting something a bit more user friendly and capable than Audacity...it will make your editing easier and faster."

Reaper or, the bargain Samplitude Pro X3 and all the trimmings is still running I believe. "Spectral Layers" could be handy here?

Dave.
 
Thanks for that! Whereas I definitely agree that gating the crap out of drum tracks is often unnecessary, in this case there was significant bleed with guitar.
 
Inoasatana said:
Thanks for that! Whereas I definitely agree that gating the crap out of drum tracks is often unnecessary, in this case there was significant bleed with guitar.
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In most cases, guitar bleeding into drum tracks is not a big deal. However, I had one experience where a drummer was very quiet and the guitarist so loud that the drum tracks were awash with bleed. That was a nightmare to deal with.
 
I wouldn't be a big deal ordinarily, however I am going for a very compressed snare here and not editing mercilessly would mean that all of the bleed would be super compressed also.
 
Inoasatana said:
I wouldn't be a big deal ordinarily, however I am going for a very compressed snare here and not editing mercilessly would mean that all of the bleed would be super compressed also.
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Better strategy would be to use EQ to cut some of the hit hat so the snare can remain present.

Alternatively, you could keep the gated/compressed snare and mix that in with the non-gated, raw snare track (*might* need to swap phase/make further adjustments to avoid it). This will allow you to retain some control over the snare but also let some of the hi hat through.

I'm not sure why you're working in the box with Audacity, then sending it back out again to the Tascam dp24sd. Once in the box you can do everything the Tascam dp24sd can, and much more. Get Reaper and learn it. Your recordings will thank you.
 
Why not duplicate the snare track as recorded, beat the help out of it on one, and on the other, take away all the bottom end, revealing your high hat - and the remaining star will probably be able to wipe out the untreated lower level snare left in the new hat track.

What I don't get is how you developed your process - the treatment, the notion of compression as a must, and spending that time on editing note by note? Why? Hard gating and compression can be the standard for some styles, but I get the impression, and hopefully am wrong, that you started this treatment without even doing. rough mix on the basic track. Until a bit of a change in style a few years back, gates and compressors were rarely even used in my mixes, now a little compression on vocals and bass often happen, but I still haven't used a gate for years. I just hate the sound - I like reality. Of course, my music and yours will be very different.
 
Parallel compression would probably have been/will be the way to go for snare squashng. If you were determined to isolate the snare, it would have been best to duplicate the track and cut up the dupe. You can still parallel the snare track so the o/heads wont be affected. If you are determined to have a loud hat then I would say dupe the ohead, cut the best sounding hat hits, eq them and dupe/comp them and bring them in where needed. Which will probably be very little. (I'm guessing from your original post you don't have a separate high hat track already?)
 
The hi hat in the overheads is what you want to use, not the bleed from the snare mic. Compress the overheads (after sending them to a stereo bus) to get the cymbals and the hats more even with each other.
 
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