Hat bleed in snare

  • Thread starter Thread starter ecktronic
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I'm in the overheads-only camp. But then, I'm also all for natural foods.

Yes, you won't ever eliminate bleed from the high hats. That's why it's important to use a snare mic which has great off-axis response.
 
If you are doing rock drums, overhead only techniques will rarely give you the snare and tom sound you need. Hi hat bleed is a tough one. I switched from sm57's to beta 57a's a while ago and it helps a little. The biggest thing is getting the drummer to back off his hats a bit or to get on the snare a little more. In general i rarely even use the hi hat mic in the mix. The overheads usually do a pretty good job getting the hat (depending on the drummers cymbal set up and how many he/she has). The snare top also lets in a little. Adding a bottom snare mic has really helped the hi hat bleed out as well. Other than that, you may want to try and build a nice little shiled that attaches to your stand and physically shields out some of the hi hats from the snare mic. Gates in my opinion actually make this problem worse. I would prefer to have a song where the hi hats were always a little too loud than where they change dramatically every time the snare gate opens.
 
xstatic said:
If you are doing rock drums, overhead only techniques will rarely give you the snare and tom sound you need.
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I understand you said "rarely" but... John Bonham only needed overheads, kick and snare. It can be done. Although I wouldn't do any metal bands with only overheads/kick/snare mics. :)

xstatic said:
Hi hat bleed is a tough one.
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Yeah it can be disastrous if the drummer doesn't "behave."

xstatic said:
Gates in my opinion actually make this problem worse. I would prefer to have a song where the hi hats were always a little too loud than where they change dramatically every time the snare gate opens.
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Depends how you set the gate. If I have to gate a snare it will be to capture the attack of the snare and not the decay as much, so the blurt of cymbal/hat bleed almost becomes part of the snare sound.

If the gate is making the hats sound funny it's not set right.

Admittedly, gates aren't my favorite way of handling this phenom--sound replacer is.
 
Cloneboy Studio said:
Depends how you set the gate. If I have to gate a snare it will be to capture the attack of the snare and not the decay as much, so the blurt of cymbal/hat bleed almost becomes part of the snare sound.

If the gate is making the hats sound funny it's not set right.
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By capture the attack do you mean that there is no bleed before the snares attack because the gate is closed, instead of their being bleed then the snare being sounded. The contrast from no sound (gated) to snare makes it seem more attacky than without a gate?
Or are you using the gates opening speed to produce attack?

I aint sure thats a good idea using the bleed as part of the snare sound man. It sounds weird having an increase in hi-hat ( from bleed) volume.
 
I have a few suggestions to offer, all of which I've used on various sessions/mix sessions to full success.

1. Lighter hats(very optional)
2. mic top and bottom so you don't have to add so much top eq
-get the most balanced and accurate OH sound you can
-make sure your stereo field matches the L-R alignment of hh and snare
3. either in your daw or your console, compress and limit the life out of either a track copy or an aux send of the snare then gate it severely so all that's left is a tick which you can then add to the original snare hit making it very present and full of attack, and, as I find, only needing deductive eq and a low place in the mix-as J.J. Puig would call it, implied power.
4. lightly and musically gate the original snare track(if you feel you want more seperation).
5. eq the body of the snare out of the HH tracks and eq a little top in higher than you would on snare and at a more narrow bandwith..only a little mind you.

I wish there were an example available of the band whos drummer was so undynamic that I had to do all these steps on about 75% of the songs. Good luck!

Matt
 
Cheers SilentSound. Point #3 sounds like an idea. Might give that a go, but im gonna do a drum stereo sub mix as it is of the kik/snare/toms. So might not work with seperate snare sub mix, but worth a shot anyhoo.
 
ecktronic said:
I aint sure thats a good idea using the bleed as part of the snare sound man. It sounds weird having an increase in hi-hat ( from bleed) volume.
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Set the threshold/key so that the gate only triggers off the snare. Set a VERY FAST attack time... like .1 ms or so. Set a hold time of around 87 ms and a release time of about 150-250 ms.

The high hat bleed will follow the gate's envelope and sound like part of the snare.

I can post an example of myself using this technique this weekend if you like. I'm not going into the studio until Friday night so I can copy a song I did that used that technique so you can judge it in real life.
 
This may be common sense but I see alot of guys trying to do it this way and its normally why they think Gating drums suck. In your plugin settings or your hardware unit you want to set the gate as an EXPANDER for drums. This will drastically cut back on the amount of bleed but will keep the drums sounding musical. There are some cases where a full on gate will work but its been rare in my experience.
 
In my opinion gates can certainly be very useful. I use them quite often. However, if you have too much hi hat bleed I still maintain that a gate can be counterproductive to that problem. It's really a physics issue. Too much bleed with a gated snare can often look like this...... chick..chick..CHICK..chick The CHICK is where the gate opened. Often times compression will exaggerate that even more, depending on the sound and EQ of both the hat and/or the snare. When I get too much hat bleed I usually will start leaning a little heavier on the bottom snare mic and poosibly even blending a sample in with the bottom snare mic. I also start to lean a little heavier on the room mics and/or the overhead mics. I really like the idea of trying to make the hat become a part of the snare sound. I do that all the time, bleed or no. But too much hat means that sometimes you have to compromise your snare sound to use the top mic the way you normally would.

As far as John Bonham goes.... Of course almost every drummer worships him. They all love them sound. Most drummers however don't want that sound on THEIR kit. Led Zeppelin left a lot of space in their songs for a sound like that and it became a part of their "signature" sound. It is a VERY different sound then 99% of what people do now adays. It's not because they can't get that sound, but because it isn't the right sound for them. Which also means it may not be the right technique to use either. If you have an incredible sounding room, awesome mic and prea combos, a really well tuned kit, and a drummer that really knows how to control his dynamics to maximize the efficiency of the room, method of recording, and equipment used, a 2 or 3 mic approach can do a great job with ROCK drums. If you are missing parts of that chain though, you may seriously regret it come mix down. You won't get that Danny Kerry sound with 3 mics. My biggest complaint with not close micing is that I like the chunky beefy tom sound on a lot of rock drum mixes. That just does not happen very well with a 2 or 3 mic approach unless you have a lot of other things going for you.
 
Yeah please could you post a clip of this technique Cloneboy. I totally know what you mean, but I have never got this technique to sound right. Snare hits just weren't consistent enough to set the threshold right. Suppose i could slap the compressor before the gate, but prob wouldnt work as the bleed would be louder in comparison to snare after compression. Ahhh, im thinking too much.
 
ecktronic said:
Snare hits just weren't consistent enough to set the threshold right. Suppose i could slap the compressor before the gate, but prob wouldnt work as the bleed would be louder in comparison to snare after compression. Ahhh, im thinking too much.
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Actually you are correct about the bleed getting raised in level increasing the chance of a mis-trigger on the gate. Of course, if you have the gate keying off a particular freq range unique to the snare you won't need to do that.

Or hit the track with an expander first.
 
Cloneboy Studio said:
Actually you are correct about the bleed getting raised in level increasing the chance of a mis-trigger on the gate. Of course, if you have the gate keying off a particular freq range unique to the snare you won't need to do that.

Or hit the track with an expander first.
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But isnt the snares most prominent frequency simialr to the hats frequency though? Could be wrong.

I aint too sure what an expander does yet. All i have noticed is that it maked things louder!! Any chance you could tell us a little bit about how the expander works please? Sorry to not have much knowledge yet, but I am learning and pretty quick thaks to this forum. :)
 
ecktronic said:
But isnt the snares most prominent frequency simialr to the hats frequency though? Could be wrong.
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you can key the snare off of freqs the hat dosn't have much power in in,
like 700-900, or whatever, just play with it.

expander, here's a big hole in my personal knowlege so i'd like a breakdown too. :D
 
Often times snare drums and hi hats have a lot of the same frequency fundamentals. Expanders usually don't work in this scenario because they will increase the hats every time the snare hits also. This will just make your problem the same with a hotter signal. Gating, expansion, keying etc... can certainly work, but it only really works when the hi hat is not hit at the same time as the snare. When they are hit together and the hat is too loud, there is often not a lot you can do with that track which is why it prompts me to experiment with other tracks to find a way to make them all work well together. Personally, I would rather have the hi hats a little too loud in a mix and chalf it up to personal prefernce rather than have the hi hat sound constantly jumping in volume and shifting tone throught out a song which to me stands out as poor engineering. Kind of like phased overheads. Even if it was done on purpose, I would probably still chalk it up to poor engineering in my own mind.
 
Cheers all. Entrigued abou the expander. Ok heres my take on it. (Im just guessing what it does)
An expander raises the level of a signal when the signal reaches the threshold. So a snare hit which would be louder (hopefully) than the hat bleed would trigger the expander and boost the volume of anything above that threshold only (ie the snare hopefully)

Clone boy please enlighten me and Giraffe and tell me that im totally wrong! :)
 
This is a pretty accurate assumption concerning expanders. The only real problem comes when the hi hat is hit at the same time as the snare. When that happens the hi hat is increased as well.
 
seems like a better idea to expand the hat into the snare occasionally then to compress the snare into the hat all the time though.
 
giraffe said:
seems like a better idea to expand the hat into the snare occasionally then to compress the snare into the hat all the time though.
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Yeah but if the snare is always louder than the hat bleed and the hat bleed doesnt reach the thrshold set then the hat shouldnt be boosted right?
 
like was said earlier, any hat hit that happens at the same time as a snare hit will.
 
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