Drum Tracks: To Scrub or not (when?) to scrub.....

Bartman

Bartman

I count on me
To what degree, if at all, do you "scrub" the .wav files of your individual drum tracks?

Or do you eliminate the need to "scrub" by effectively using noise gates on the front (or back) end?

A combination of both?

I don't have a good grasp of using noise gates so I spend alot of time deleting or silencing unwanted sounds between the wanted drum strikes to achieve what I hear as a cleaner, crisper, punchier drum kit sound.

I'm very interested in various approaches and said "pros" & "cons".

Thanks much.

Bart
 
Dude,

I know you want to be down on the audio engineer lingo and shit, and I can dig it daddy-o.

But 'scrubbing' audio refers to rocking a reel to reel head across the tape to locate exact points in a song or track. It has nothing to do with editing except finding your location.

When someone refers to 'scrubbing' audio (even digitally) they mean they are not playing it per se, but manually looking for a particular point in a waveform/track.
 
Yeah, that's not "scrubbing", but I do that sometimes. Usually with vocals tracks, though. For drums I either gate 'em or just let 'em play. Depends on the sound, how much bleed through the tom mics, etc.
 
I used the wrong terminology

Response to Clone.

I didn't know I used the wrong terminology and apologize if that caused confusion.

Regarding the following from your response....hopefully my reply is off base and you were kidding......not being a rude, arrogant individual. Your response can be taken either way and some of your past responses to others have conveyed arrogance.

You said:

"I know you want to be down on the audio engineer lingo and shi*, and I can dig it daddy-o"

I'm a guitar player, singer and songwriter. I've never represented myself as an audio engineer, nor do I intentionally use terminology ("lingo") with the intent of making myself seem more knowledgeable about a subject than I really am. Fact of the matter is this.....my recording skills and knowledge are at the novice to intermediate level. I have complete respect for anyone who has either a formal engineering degree of any type or who has informally (through hard work, apprenticeships, etc...) educated themself toward that discipline.

Clone, you represent yourself as knowing your craft, but often "talk down" to people on this forum when you respond. People who consistently do that generally do so because of a lack of confidence or some other inadequacy. I feel sorry for you if it makes you feel better when you put others down. I prefer to pick people up......be helpful. Try it, you'll be a happier person.

I'm 43 years old, married and have 4 kids. After an 18 year hiatus from professional performing, I recently rediscovered my passion for making, performing and recording music. This forum has been an invaluable resource for me. I thank everyone who has answered or even tried to answer my sometimes elementary questions.

You knew exactly what I was asking but chose to highlight my misuse of a term rather than answer the question. In my line of work we use pre and post sales engineers to support the sales process. The good SE's answer questions first then counsel if the request for support was presented in a less than optimal manner. The bad ones respond like you did. The latter don't last very long becuase they don't help the company make money.

Food for thought as you think about your future interactions with paying customers and people in general.....daddy-o.

Peace be with you.
 
Bartman, I know that seems frustrating to you, but....welcome to the world of internet BBS's. He was letting you know that you used the wrong terminology. Be grateful for his input and do your best to ignore what you see as him "being a rude, arrogant individual". When I read through it, I didn't get that impression at all, and I have seen numerous posts in the past where he has very patiently answered newbie questions with exactly what they needed to hear.

The short of it is, don't flip out over little things like that. It makes people less likely to want to help you in the future.
 
Cloneboy Studio said:
Dude,

I know you want to be down on the audio engineer lingo and shit, and I can dig it daddy-o.

But 'scrubbing' audio refers to rocking a reel to reel head across the tape to locate exact points in a song or track. It has nothing to do with editing except finding your location.

When someone refers to 'scrubbing' audio (even digitally) they mean they are not playing it per se, but manually looking for a particular point in a waveform/track.
Click to expand...

I didn't think Bartman was totally off in his terminalogy. I usually use the scrub function on my digital recorder to find start and end points for erasing, so that's what I figured he meant. Anyway, to answer your question, I don't use gates too often, though my drums are usually from a box. I do scrub and erase on most other tracks. It is tedious and you have to be careful not to cut off something that will be missed, like a singer taking a quick breath before singing a line, that can add intimacy to a track. I usually copy a track before editing, just in case.
 
I was just having a bit of fun at correcting him. Trust me, he'll never misuse the term 'scrub audio' again. :)

And by the way I am a bit of a jerk. I hope that doesn't bother you when I'm answering your questions.

Scrubbing audio is part of editing sometimes, but not really the same thing now is it?

If we want to talk about editing audio or drum tracks we can do that as well. I ruthlessly edit mine by using a combination of gates (do this before compression) and silences. The tom mics I always silence unless the drummer is actually hitting them--I typically do this by hand. Seems to help the toms explode more.
 
scrub a dub

Hey Bartman,
Id say unless you want your drums and recordings to sound like 1987 country songs Id leave the gates and "scrubbing" alone.

The whole feel and sound of a drum kit is just that, it's a kit, meaning several drums lending sonic qualities to each other, if they are tuned decently, let'em sing I say. How bout that terminology "sonic qualities" hehe............

all the best,

Makes
(Im a drummer, 40 years old, have been recording in nashville tn since 1990)
 
I only recommend gating kick and snare to eliminate some bleed. Mostly snare though. I do the toms by hand just to get rid of the bleed except when the toms hit.

As far as the snare goes, I hate having the high hat get that increase in energy from the compression and eq'ing I do to the snare.

Gating the overheads... now that would be dumb.
 
makes said:
Hey Bartman,
Id say unless you want your drums and recordings to sound like 1987 country songs Id leave the gates and "scrubbing" alone.

The whole feel and sound of a drum kit is just that, it's a kit, meaning several drums lending sonic qualities to each other, if they are tuned decently, let'em sing I say. How bout that terminology "sonic qualities" hehe............

all the best,

Makes
(Im a drummer, 40 years old, have been recording in nashville tn since 1990)
Click to expand...

Great advice IMO.
 
Actually having a drum kit around can add to the ambience of non-drum tracks in certain sparse instrumentation situations - one of Jeff Buckley's tunes, think it could be Lilac Wine, has a section where there is no drum playing, just bass, and you can hear the mic picking up the bass rattling the snare from the drum kit that was clearly quite close. Sounds very live - probably was in fact. Sounds excellent.
 
For me the general rule has been to never gate room or overhead mics, sometimes gate close mics.

I'm trying to capture more of the room when recording drums, and just use the close mics to beef things up as required.

I agree with cloneboy about the toms. I manually envelope these also.

I sometimes use Drumagog to replace my kick with a sample. This is handy as it also acts as a gate by triggering only above a certain threshold
 
Great advice

Great advice from all. Thanks much.

It seems that my post recording treatment of drum tracks is in line with most of you.

I silence inactive portions of tom tracks (hey I didn't say "scrub") and sometimes use Drumagog on the kick drum.

Do you think better placement of my snare mic (SM57) would eliminate the heavy bleed I'm getting from the hi-hat or does the short distance between the kit pieces make it unavoidable? or is a gate the best way to go?

Bart
 
Bartman said:
Do you think better placement of my snare mic (SM57) would eliminate the heavy bleed I'm getting from the hi-hat or does the short distance between the kit pieces make it unavoidable? or is a gate the best way to go?
Click to expand...

You're going to get some hat bleed in your snare no matter what... and the more the drummer bashes away at the hat, the more bleed you get until you want to strangle them. Personally I often gate that out of there, because otherwise after all the compression and EQ the high hat becomes way louder than what you'll probably want.

Generally speaking close snare mics are, for me anyways, only part of the snare equation... I look to the overheads to give as much of my snare sound as humanly possible with a little help from the close mics. Unfortunately the dumb high hat is there as well, but at least the balance sounds more natural.
 
I use a Beyer M201 on the snare, and the amount of hat bleed is a LOT less than with a 57. Plus I think it sounds better. YMMV.
 
I am with Mad Audio, the M201 is one of the best mics for snare. The 57 has a much wider cardioid pattern, the 201 is a hyper cardioid. The 201 has a much nice off axis response than the 57 as well. Besides that, the 201 is a decent hat mic as well.

BTW Bartman, you sure do put things in perspective, I'm afraid though that Clone didn't get the message.:D
 
The big trick to living with bleed is to get the drummer to hit the drums hard and hit the cymbals lighter. This seems to be the opposite of what most guys do. When I have a good drummer in here (one that knows how to mix himself as he is playing) I rarely have to gate anything, even with ea and compression.
 
Cloneboy Scrub

Hey clone boy

I wanna hear some of your work - drums especially do you have anything to show me?

chuck us a link to something man or PM me if your nervous :D

Jake
 
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