Recording drums small room

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sergi0arias

sergi0arias

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Hi, im recording drums in a 4 x 3 metres room, I have covered many essential aspects of drum recording but i can't seem to get the tracking right: I get too many bleed into every mic, which makes me very hard to EQ say the kick or the snare due to the cymbals bleed, and also makes it almost imposible for me to isolate them through gating, im wondering if my major problems are early reflections? Does early reflections result in a unwanted gain boost to the microphone input signal?
Im using just dynamic cardioid microphones.
Not sure if i was clear enough, hope you can help, thanx!
 
It's always nice to have a treated room; Reverberations/reflections will obvious have an impact on your sound, but if your problem is bleed, it's going to be as a result of direct sound more than early reflections.

How close are your close mics and how balanced/sensible is your playing.

I guess those are the two main problem areas. If you bang the crap out of the hi hats, the snare mic at 12" distance WILL pick it up loud and clear.

I don't know if it suits your style, but I like to aim for a good sound from the overheads only, then I use kick mics and snare mics to supplement that if necessary. Same goes for tom mics. Sometimes i don't even use them at all though.

That makes bleed much less of an issue for me.
 
My drum room isn't much bigger than yours. It's 10' x 12' and is somewhat treated. I'm pretty happy with the drum sounds I can get when the drummer is a good player and has a well tuned kit with decent heads. I'm guessing that the problem you're having is more than likely the drums themselves or the the player. It's amasing how differently the same kit can sound with two different players.
 
Thanks for your responses, my kit its not very good, so i'll try to borrow a good one to see the difference it makes when miking as i have not tried this with any other than mine.
 
You're always going to get bleed when tracking drums. There's nothing wrong with that. Try placing your overheads in different configurations and see which one gives you the best sound.
 
Yea there's really no way around some bleed when recording drums. One suggestion would be to make sure your mics are set-up properly. Have the mics for the snare, toms, and hi-hat (if your micing it) pointing in certain directions to help with lessening the bleed.

(think degrees of a circle with me for a second)

I put the snare and tom mics at 300º point then angle them to taste at the head, that way your mics are pointing in a completely opposite direction of a hi-hat on your standard kit set-up and are pointed away from cymbals. Think smart and have mics positioned in away where they are the less likely to pick up the other sound.

What are you doing with the kick drum? Ideally you should have a sound hole or have the front head off to record. I don't see how you would have noticeable bleed from cymbals.

Especially when close micing, the room becomes slightly less important, the mics are picking up more of the direct sound and less of the reflections like they would if they were overheads.

As I've been recording more and more over the past few months, I've been finding probably 80% of the issues I run into can be fixed with simply moving the mic in some way. I'd suggest starting there.
 
Nobody has asked the all important question of how many mics are you using? And tell us what mic positioning are you using? Are you using (dynamic) overheads?

Bleed is going to be unavoidable, but as someone else mentioned, that's not neccesarily a bad thing (except for the high hat in the snare mic sometimes...lol).

And you shouldn't really be too concerned about bleed on individual tracks either. It's how everything sounds/meshes together that counts...and that includes your instruments/vocals too, not just how the whole drum kit sounds by itself.

It's the total sound that counts.

So keep that in mind. Sometimes the individual track sounds really crappy, but when it's part of the mix, it works for the song.
 
IMHO...I think the bleed is what makes it sound like a real kit...instead of a bunch of individual drums. The core of my drum tracks is the OH pair...which picks up the whole kit. The couple of spot mics I use on the kick and snare are only there to "beef" up sound a bit.
 
Wish14 said:
Nobody has asked the all important question of how many mics are you using? And tell us what mic positioning are you using? Are you using (dynamic) overheads?
Click to expand...
You're absolutely right. We don't really even know if we're talking about overheads being used, or just spot mics, etc.....

I think that when I read this:
sergi0arias said:
I have covered many essential aspects of drum recording
Click to expand...
I assumed we're at least dealing with a legit overhead/spot mic configuration of some kind. :cool:
 
this was taken from wikipedia. if you're really concerned about bleed, which i don't think you should be, you could try things this way. it worked for joy division...

"Producer Martin Hannett "dedicated himself to capturing and intensifying Joy Division's eerie spatiality". Hannett believed punk rock was sonically conservative because of its refusal to utilise studio technology to create sonic space.[60] The producer instead aimed to create a more expansive sound on the group's records. Hannett said, "[Joy Division] were a gift to a producer, because they didn't have a clue. They didn't argue."[4] Hannett demanded clean and clear "sound separation" not only for individual instruments, but even for individual pieces of Morris's drumkit. Morris recalled, "Typically on tracks he considered to be potential singles, he'd get me to play each drum on its own to avoid any bleed-through of sound."
 
this was taken from wikipedia. if you're really concerned about bleed, which i don't think you should be, you could try things this way. it worked for joy division...

"Producer Martin Hannett "dedicated himself to capturing and intensifying Joy Division's eerie spatiality". Hannett believed punk rock was sonically conservative because of its refusal to utilise studio technology to create sonic space.[60] The producer instead aimed to create a more expansive sound on the group's records. Hannett said, "[Joy Division] were a gift to a producer, because they didn't have a clue. They didn't argue."[4] Hannett demanded clean and clear "sound separation" not only for individual instruments, but even for individual pieces of Morris's drumkit. Morris recalled, "Typically on tracks he considered to be potential singles, he'd get me to play each drum on its own to avoid any bleed-through of sound."
 
Hello again guys, i did some acoustic treatment to the rooms, and I feel i'm actually getting the separation I needed to work with the drums, maybe I wasn't clear enough by explaining my problem at first, I do know bleeding is normal and imposible to avoid, but after miking with 4 or 5 microphones i was getting a very similar signal in every one of them, shure, the kick drum was louder in its microphone, but it wasnt loud enough compared to the snare in that same mic, so it was imposible for me to apply gating correctly.
I dampened some of the toms, and the cymbals, got some foam in the walls and now my snare isnt as loud as the kick drum in the kick microphone (and the same with all the other microphones), now i can gate the drums to deal with the bleed and process each part of the kit and then lay down the OH to get it all together.
I still think that were early reflections that were taking too much kick into the snare mic, too much toms into the snare, and so on, i wonder if there's more to say about it, if you guys got some usefull info ill be glad to hear it :D
 
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