How can I fix bleed through caused by compression??

[Crayon Boy]

I love the sound of compressed drums, but I usually can't raise the ratio beyond 2:50 because I start getting bleed through... I mostly pick up high-hat and cymbals through the snare and tom mics. How can I fix this... because I really like the way the drums sound at a higher comrpession ratio, but the bleed throws off my mix. Any solutions or comments would be helpful and appreciated.

 

[chessrock]

That's kind of the million-dollar question.

Your only real option is to try and minimize the bleed as much as possible by using highly directional mics and work the "null points" in their pickup pattern . . . and, of course, use a noise gate.

 

[noiseportrait]

Yeah, use a noise gate if you can get away with it. Just gate out all the bleed before you compress. This takes practice to get sounding right, but it works. Gating wouldn't be my first option though, because you can hear it in the tracks most of the time, but if you are compressing the snot out of your tracks anyway, then for that type of music you probably aren't too concerned with preserving the original natural sound of the recording in the first place. The cool thing about gates is that the cheap software stuff works just as well as the expensive hardware, so it's easy for us home recordists.

 

[xstatic]

I would be really hesitant to start gating too hard in order to heavily compress. If you do that, then things like the hi hat and OH's (or whatever you were trying to get rid of) will start to swim a whole lot every time the gate opens up. If things are coming up by compressing the snare, then try and use those sounds in your mix. maybe turn down or even mute the hi hat track and see how it sounds. Another thing is try different snare mics and placements to help minimize those other sounds. You might even want to try and physically build something that helps isolate the snare mic a little more. What I usually do is rely on my bottom snare mic to help with radical sound changing on my snare drum tracks. If placed properly the bottom mic will not get too much bleed so that you can give it a really tight gate and use it to add a lot of smack and/or punch to a snare.

As far as software gating goes, software gates are definately very usable. However, I do find them to be very different feeling and sounding to a good hardware gate. They may work as well as a Behringer gate (which I actually don't mind using at all), but don't have nearly the same naturalness and transparency as something like a nice BSS, Klark Teknik or Drawmer gate. All the same, for simplicity and automation reasons I still use software gates for my mixes.

 

[fakeness]

Gate is not the best way of recording...

The reason of that is gate also caused of losing details of snare sound; i won't use it as first choice.
To isolate the snare(i used to have that problem too), my way is to put the snare mic right on the snare drum (touch closely). This way the snare will be so LOUD in the snare mic which mic is not gonna pick up much high hat and plus the High hat sound will be block by the snare skin. BUT, this way of using mic may caused serious damge to ur micorpohone if ur mic has no "PAD" to protect it.
Put the snare mic right in side the snare will be another choices, : D
very crazy idea, it will ends up like digital drum, give it a try!