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GMC Forum _ Recording _ Cleaning Up The Mud

Posted by: Ivan Milenkovic Dec 20 2011, 10:34 PM

Not all people are good at tracking drums. Sometimes you get lots of bleed that needs to be tamed. What do you do in such situation?

Posted by: tonymiro Dec 22 2011, 10:37 AM

First I really would send it back to be re-tracked rather than trying to fix it in the mix.

If and only if that couldn't be done then there are various things you can do at mixing, exactly what depends on what the bleed is and where.

You'll probably have to set a HPF to take out any unwanted low end but watch your phase as a HPF will affect it. Talking of phase you might be able to get some perceived improvement by time shifting to deliberately produce a phase imbalance and bring in comb filtering/phase cncellation. You might be able to notch filter kick drum. You might be able to manually pull down/redraw-edit unwanted transient bleed in overheads or alternatively you may be able to set a limiter to reduce it by enough dB for it to be ok. May be worth looking at your attack and release times on the drum compressors to see if you can take out transient bleed with fast times. You might have to sidechain a comp and expand, duck and gate other bleed. With all of this you'll need to both solo the indvidual drum parts that are a problem and also check the result carefully in the context of the drums as a group and as part of the final track. If none of that works then you should consider drum replacement. Use drumagog or a similar program to replace the drum sounds that have excessive bleed with an appropriate sample. You can do that whether or not the drums were recorded/tracked with a trigger or not.

Posted by: Ivan Milenkovic Dec 22 2011, 11:58 AM

These are some golden advices Tony, thank you very much