Snare drum Trick

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PhilGood

PhilGood

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Interesting little trick I discovered and thought I'd share it and see if it helps anyone.

I’m trying to get a really thick, personal sound on some country tunes I'm working on, but there is some bleed coming in (maybe from bad tuning or something) It seems as though some of the mics pick up too much ambience, especially on the snare. I am using LDC’s on toms with a –15dB pad engaged, a 57 on snare, a nice kick mic (using the paint can technique) and a set of x/y overheads. Something is picking up too much ambience of the room and I’m thinking it’s the overheads or maybe the tom LDC’s (I have 5). It picks up too much of the snare ring and does not sound thick. Should I give up the overheads in x/y and try for a left side/right side overhead technique? In my mind that would capture more punch, but I always worry about phase problems, which is why I went back to x/y. I heard about putting the top snare mic out of phase and thought about trying it.

I was playing around with the original recording and found that the source of my irritation was from the snare bleed in the toms mics. Yech! So I was messing around and decided to try some echo on the snare. I discovered that if I added a 25-35 millisecond single slap delay mixed in at under 20% it did an interesting thing. It causes the echo to be out of phase with the snare pickup in the tom mics. Just the snare, not the toms. You don’t hear the echo on the snare because it’s cancelled by the tom mics, and the tom mics no longer ‘hear’ the snare. All the punch came right back. Bang!

YMMV.;)
 
That's a great trick. I've never thought to use it when I wanted to cancel out the snare bleed in the toms. I've used it before between 15-25 to give the snare more "beef" plenty of times. I never thought to use it that way.
As far as the overhead left/right as opposed to x/y thing, personally I've never had problems using the mics as left and right. I use LDC's on the overheads as well. Depending on how you have them spaced, they should pick up two different halves of the set. It gives a nice stereo image too. >:P
 
Sounds like a good trick.
I'm concerned that this technique would take some life out of the toms though.

Could you post a before and after sample of just a tom mix at all?
Really interested to hear this in action.

Thanks,
Eck
 
phil--

this definitely sounds like a creative solution to that problem (one i've also noticed when miking toms too).

just curious, though, why not slap gates on the toms (to remove the snare hits) or just manually strip out all signal from the tom tracks that aren't actual tom hits?

i've been doing the latter (stripping out all non-tom info from the tom tracks) lately and find it to be a great solution to this. it beats setting up gates (which can be a major PITA to get properly setup, IMO) and it's a pretty quick process. really cleans up the drum tracks too.

i too often use a short delay to fatten up an anemic sounding snare.


cheers,
wade
 
PhilGood said:
I was playing around with the original recording and found that the source of my irritation was from the snare bleed in the toms mics. Yech! So I was messing around and decided to try some echo on the snare. I discovered that if I added a 25-35 millisecond single slap delay mixed in at under 20% it did an interesting thing. It causes the echo to be out of phase with the snare pickup in the tom mics. Just the snare, not the toms. You don’t hear the echo on the snare because it’s cancelled by the tom mics, and the tom mics no longer ‘hear’ the snare. All the punch came right back. Bang!

YMMV.;)
Click to expand...

wow, you know what the chances of that working are?
lets just say you got lucky.
 
If you are working with a Daw why not just edit everything out between tom hits. Do they get used that much?
 
Herm said:
If you are working with a Daw why not just edit everything out between tom hits. Do they get used that much?
Click to expand...

Because I'm trying to avoid carpel tunnel syndrome and I hate gates.
 
the possibility that the bleed in the tom tracks would be close enough with a delayed snare track to phase cancel.
it's not out of question, it's just a long shot.


i'm not trying to knock it, it worked and that's all that matters.
 
ecktronic said:
Sounds like a good trick.
I'm concerned that this technique would take some life out of the toms though.

Could you post a before and after sample of just a tom mix at all?
Really interested to hear this in action.

Thanks,
Eck
Click to expand...

I don't have a 'before' right now, but here's part of the after:

link

(very rough tracks. please exuse)
 
That would be very odd for a source tracked by two completely different mics from different distances in different positions ... to cause such drastic cancelation like that.

Very weird.

If you're working with a DAW, then why not just nudge the tracks over (and flip polarity if necessary) until the snare track is in phase with the snare captured by the tom mics ?

If you're totally against gating, that is. :D Which is kind of another weird thing. If you consider something to be "bleed," and you're calling it bleed within the context of your post ... then gating should be looked upon as completely acceptable (as bleed is generally considered to be something you don't want).

Viewing things in a much larger context, it appears that you've stumbled upon something helpful. Although I don't believe that it's actually doing what you think it's doing :D ... It still appears as though it has contributed in a positive way nonetherless - if it's giving you what you want.

.
 
giraffe said:
the possibility that the bleed in the tom tracks would be close enough with a delayed snare track to phase cancel.
it's not out of question, it's just a long shot.


i'm not trying to knock it, it worked and that's all that matters.
Click to expand...

Oh. Well, it worked for me.:)
 
Daisy said:
That would be very odd for a source tracked by two completely different mics from different distances in different positions ... to cause such drastic cancelation like that.


Viewing things in a much larger context, it appears that you've stumbled upon something helpful. Although I don't believe that it's actually doing what you think it's doing :D ... It still appears as though it has contributed in a positive way nonetherless - if it's giving you what you want.

.
Click to expand...


Well, in my mind here's what I believe to be happening. Sorry to illustrate with sine waves as opposed to an actual source, but I think you'll get my meaning. I could very well be wrong, but in listening to the raw drum tracks when I engaged the delay the ambience in the tom tracks disappeared.

Since the sound arrives at the tom mics at a slightly different time than the snare mic, I think it has a ms or so delay on it's own. Shifting the same sound from the snare mic on a similar amplitude would be something like this:

Looking at this, though it would probably not work the way I'm thinking so you're probably right.

It does something nice though.
 

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Perhaps it's doing something more like this, where the snare pickup in the tom mics isn't in or out of phase, but adding the delay to the snare cancels it.

I dunno.
 

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PhilGood said:
Because I'm trying to avoid carpel tunnel syndrome and I hate gates.
Click to expand...

I imagine a LDC on a tom would be tricky to gate if the snare's getting walloped and the probably tom less so. And 5 gated LDCs jittering on and off sounds like a can of auditory worms. Thanks for sharing the cancellation trick.
 
25-35 ms delay? For this to work, your snare and toms would have to be over 20 feet apart from each other. I doubt that's the case. It did something, and you got lucky. If you can repeat this with a different setup I'd be impressed.
 
IronFlippy said:
25-35 ms delay? For this to work, your snare and toms would have to be over 20 feet apart from each other. I doubt that's the case. It did something, and you got lucky. If you can repeat this with a different setup I'd be impressed.
Click to expand...

Well, now I'm rethinking this. It did something, but as said before, maybe not what I thought. I liked what it did but now I'm not sure it was what I thought, All I know is I liked the sound it gave me.

Put it this way: A 5ms delay almost phased out the snare completely. It almost disappeared. I kept pushing it up until the snare became fat and punchy in a way I couldn't get it to sound even reversing the phase of the snare mic and it nearly killed all the ambiance feed from the tom mics.

I plan on repositioning the overheads and other mics to see if I get different results.

Anyway, I think I'll close this thread in case I made a serious error in my assumptions.

Thanks for all the feedback everybody! Part of the learning experience and I appreciate all the wisdom provided!

Back to the tracks!:)
 
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