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Old 7th November 2005, 02:54 PM   #3
not_so_new
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nut
Hmmm.... A nasty thing...

Many of my favorite recordings feature perfect seperation between the snare and highhat. The engineer was somehow able to keep the two sounds totally seperate of eachother, allowing the hats to be panned hard right/left and for the hats to be coming from that direction only. They will then compress the crap out fo the snare, but not get any of that associated hats spill that can make a snare sound like a burst of white noise...

What are the tricks behind this seperation ? I've tried all sorts of snare mic positions, but it never seems to matter. Gates don't help me either. Is it the room ? Is it to do with the overheads ? Please, educate me !
First are you sure that many of your favorite recordings feature perfect separation? Perfect separation is impossible, you can't do it... can't... sorry. You can get better separation with placement and small blockers, "mini-gobos" but you are never going to get complete separation from live mics.

So I believe one of two things are going on. 1) there is not as much separation as you might think there is. I have squashed a snare track before and have still been able to pull the hat to one side or the other in the mix. I don't do this much anymore because it just sounds unnatural to me. Now most if not all of my drum mics stay inside 3 and 9 for the most part. If you are going for more separation (which is all good) I don't see why you can't pull the hat over? 2) My guess is the snare and maybe the hat tracks are replaced, no bleed and you can compress each to taste.

Hope this helps.
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