How can you eliminate bleed when recording drums? resampling? Help please!

[xstortionist]

Ive been having a really tough time when recording drums. I get alot of drummers that don't play to the click 100% and when i run the audio file through beat detective it usually never lines up correctly because my drum mics pic up all the other drums and it bleeds into the other mics.

Is there a way to resample the drums once they have been recording without triggers? What is the best technique to record drums without having bleed?

thank you

Derek Bess

[lincol1]

If you want individual "Samples" of the drums record them in an isolated environment one at a time as to get no sympathetic vibrations.

INHO having some bleed helps create an authentic drum sound. Hearing some snares rattle on the toms makes me happy.

Maybe the problem isn't the bleed but the timing of your drummer

I mean how bad are these tracks? You want a human feel otherwise EZ Drummer/Strike to the rescue.

If it's just a couple notes under the table - you can edit - if your guy is completely out of the pocket - good luck

[xstortionist]

Lincoln these bands (This is the 5th band) never have guys that are on time and i can't afford to hire on a studio musician to do the work for me.

What I really want to do is resample their drums after they record because I'm tired of the bleed and I spend countless hours editing drums and I know there is an easier way to do it. The producer I worked with in the studio in delray beach said he used a protools plugin that replaced the sound. I'm a studio guitarist and I am clueless when it comes to these damn drums.

more help would greatly be appreciated.

[xstortionist]

That and these guys usually come into my studio with low grade quality drums that don't have that sound i'm looking for.

[lincol1]

right...so you'd like to have the drummer come in, play his part, then you use that recording as a kind of reference as to what the part "should" be or was intended to be.

Then you would replace the entire part with sampled drums to correct the way the instrument sounds and cover up the weakness of the player?

Yeah that's a lot of work. Why even have the guy play? It's one thing to add samples along side of a track to beef it up, but this sounds a little different.

When you say you are tired of the bleed do you mean bleed from say the snare to the kick? Or are there room mics that you are talking about? Are you using any king of gate on your tracks? That can help isolate the individual drums a bit too...

[Audiofarm]

I'm sure you know this..
You have to group the tracks and treat them as one.
If you try to move around individual tracks you are messing things up.
You know this of course

[xstortionist]

Basically I'm tired of editing the drums because these guys come into the studio with no studio experience. I'm starting off as a producer and Its hard for me to pick and choose which bands come in. I do all the guitar tracking for the bands because i save alot of time that.

When i talk about bleed the kick mic will pick up the snare hits. I dont want that and yes I am using a gate on the mics, but its still not enough.

I hear that they have something called "sound replacer stock in your R-TAS plug-ins" but I'm not 100% sure if my version of protool has this.

Has anyone ever used this tool before?

[Darney]

Originally Posted by xstortionist

Basically I'm tired of editing the drums because these guys come into the studio with no studio experience. I'm starting off as a producer and Its hard for me to pick and choose which bands come in. I do all the guitar tracking for the bands because i save alot of time that.

When i talk about bleed the kick mic will pick up the snare hits. I dont want that and yes I am using a gate on the mics, but its still not enough.

I hear that they have something called "sound replacer stock in your R-TAS plug-ins" but I'm not 100% sure if my version of protool has this.

Has anyone ever used this tool before?

If you're picking up the snare enough from the kick mic to screw up resampling, then you're mic'ing the kick wrong! Put the mic INSIDE the drum... about five inches from the beater. If you're still getting too much snare, put a low-pass filter on the kick mic and cut out the snare snap. Play with the freq until it's level is acceptable.r

Sound replacer works with Pro Tools LE, or you could get Massey's DTM for free (if you buy one of his other plug ins, which are fantastic and very inexpensive).

As always, your results may vary.

[albee1952]

Lots of good advice here. I'll toss in another POV. What works well for me is to clean the tom tracks of everything except the tom hits(with short fades on the ends). Tab to Transient is perfect for finding the leading edges. By dumping all the bleed from the tom tracks, it cleans up the overall kit sound to a large degree(enough so I can make the rest of the kit sound fine with normal plugins). If the toms aren't making me smile, I will insert Drumagog and grab some samples that are close in tuning to the originals. That way, they blend with the old tom bleed into the overheads. Also, Drumagog allows you to blend the sample with the original and I will often use 50-75% blend in favor of the sample.

[lincol1]

nice albee!