Advise needed, please!

[jamesblond]

Hi, people.

Currently I'm mixing a folk rock song. I'm not (yet) a professional mixing engineer or producer with years and years of experience. If I was, I wouldn't have posted this thread.

It's a folk-rock song, with a lot of power in the compostition, arrangement and production. I am compressing the drums, including the overheads. However, without even turning up the fader of the hihat itself, the hihat is way too loud in the mix because of the compression of the overheads and room-mics. If I compress less, I don't get the effect that I want. Re-recording is out of the question, because it's all DFH: samples.

Is there a way to get a crunchy, heavy compression, without destroying the balance between everything recorded on that track? In this case: I'd like to get nice, crunchy, heavy compression, without this hihat crashing through my mix. The cymbals must be loud, but not the hi-hat.

Anyone know how to do this?

Thanks.

[mwagener]

A couple of long shots: try to polarity reverse the hat track and mix it in with the overheads? you might have to time align the hat track, since the oh mics are further away than the hat mic, probably 3-6 ms later, try for best effect. If that doesn't work try to feed the hat track to the side chain of the compressor used on the overheads, but not to the mix buss. Set the level so the hat makes the compressor work harder whenever the hat is hit.

[hourglass]

Not that my advice is in the same league as MW, but when I run into this a lot of the time I find it's the result of a badly mic'd snare.

As in your highly compressed snare track could be bleeding A LOT more hat into the mix than the OH channels.

A liberal amount of LO-PASS above the point of the snare crack can usually tame it down... tho how much of it goes away is dependent on how it was recorded.

Aside from that, I tend to not crush my OH channels. I will bus the actual drum tracks - the ones which consist of actual tubs with heads... out and crush the living shit out of them if that's what it takes, but I'll leave the OH channels out of the compression buss.

I know you said you can't re-record it, but the ideal solution would be to have a separate room mic (or mics...) which you can crush the bejeezus out of for the ambience w/o sacrificing the detail in your OH channels.

just my 2 cents...

ryan

[jamesblond]

Originally Posted by hourglass

Not that my advice is in the same league as MW, but when I run into this a lot of the time I find it's the result of a badly mic'd snare.

As in your highly compressed snare track could be bleeding A LOT more hat into the mix than the OH channels.

A liberal amount of LO-PASS above the point of the snare crack can usually tame it down... tho how much of it goes away is dependent on how it was recorded.

Aside from that, I tend to not crush my OH channels. I will bus the actual drum tracks - the ones which consist of actual tubs with heads... out and crush the living shit out of them if that's what it takes, but I'll leave the OH channels out of the compression buss.

I know you said you can't re-record it, but the ideal solution would be to have a separate room mic (or mics...) which you can crush the bejeezus out of for the ambience w/o sacrificing the detail in your OH channels.

just my 2 cents...

ryan

My snare top and bottom tracks are pretty tightly gated, so bleed over these tracks is not a problem. It's really the Hat this is lifted enormously. I think that sidechaining, like Mr. Wagener said, is a good option to try.

I will also try to compress the overheads less, and work more with compression on room mics. That way, I should indeed keep the crispyness in the symbals that I want.

I work in CubaseSX3. Does anyone out here now if there is a good software compressor that has an option for an external side chain? I haven't found one yet. There are some with built in high-pass filters that are used as sidechains, but there is no way to send a signal into the compressor.

Thanks!! thumbsup