Dynamics Problem: I need some help here.

[Keyplayer]

I'm mixing 8 tracks of drums that were basically well recorded but has some hellacious bleeding problems. The song is an "Old School" Funk tune and the drummer is wearing out this half open Hi Hat that is washing over EVERYTHING! :(

The kick drum had an annoying ring around 450, which I was able to smooth out with a multi-band compressor. I was also able to significantly reduce snare and hat bleed from the track. But when I used the DA7 Gate on the track, this thing sounded huge! More importantly, now there was no snare or hat!

I did the reverse on the snare. I reduced the highs which pushed the hat back and then gated it to get rid of the kick and what was left of the hat. Again, it sounded great.

I actually inserted silence between all the tom fills because, you can actually get away with that when you're dealing with toms. Sounds great.

The overheads were the real nightmare with all those cymbals going and that freakin' hat sounded like Niagra Falls! :eek: I panned them hard left and right and just used the track for ambience (sort of like room, but not). But now we've got a ballgame, right?

Wrong. I've lost all my dynamic range on the kick and snare! :mad: They sound great but no matter how hard I crank them they don't get any louder. If I turn off the gates I've got a noisy mess. If I leave the gates in, I've got no balanced blend between the toms, OH's, and the kick & snare.

Can I get away with printing the kick and snare onto another pair of tracks and then turn off the gates for the blend between those "new tracks" or is there some other approach I should be using, like gating via a plug-in or something?

[NathanEldred]

Keyplayer wrote:

I'm mixing 8 tracks of drums that were basically well recorded but....

Apparently not.


I'm at a loss, without being there in person it's very hard to troubleshoot this problem.

It doesn't make any sense that a gate would keep you from being able to turn the [gated] snare or kick up or down in volume. I was thinking when I first started reading that maybe you had a compressor plug in post fader (I'm assuming you're mixing in the computer?), but apparently not the case. What kind of gate are you using, does it have any kind of side chain? Sometimes that won't even help if the hat is too dominant.

I would embrace the bleed, at least the bleed that's on the kick and snare. The tom editing may be a good idea to obtain some measure of control. If the player was good (and it sounds like he was extremely dominant on the high hat, which means the player is the fundamental problem here), then you should be able to achieve some sort of balance with minimal processing. It may not be exactly what you want, but it's better than not having any snare or kick, in a funk track.

Tell us exactly how many mics were used and where each mic was precisely placed. The type of mics used would help also.

[thethrillfactor]

[Mike Tholen]

[Keyplayer]

The problem is solved. My first idea worked. I printed the gated tracks (and I didn't even have to slide them around to line up with the originals! THAT was a pleasant surprise. :D ) and replaced the originals. Then I turned the gate off on the DA7 and, voila, no more level surpression.

I have absolutely no idea why the gates had that effect, other than I really had to crank them in order to get the snare and kick separated. When the tracks printed on screen, it looked just like the toms tracks that I had gone in and edited with silence inserts between fills.

Ironically, I had to go back and get those same toms tracks to build a new overhead track. The angle of those mics somehow had better rejection of the hi hat while still picking up the ride and crash cymbals pretty well. So I put a de-esser plug across those tracks to further surpress the hat and bring the other cymbals forward. It actually worked. Then I mixed the original overheads in so far back that you more FEEL them, rather than hear them. I did this to catch the very top end sparkle of the overhead cymbals. So I managed to save the tracks.

It's not the best drum recording I've ever mixed. But it is more than adequate to the need of the project and, more importantly, the budget restraints.

The session was with a very good drummer, in a decent room, on a very good set and good gear recording 3 tunes. The mission was to replace the midi drums used in the mock ups.

There were'n t any changes in the set-up for the 3 songs. He tracked them one right after the other at roughly 2.5 takes per tune over a 4 hour session. It was amazing looking at this guy's wave files. His timing lined up with the bars and beats grid almost like the machine had!

2 of the songs were perfect. It was just this one tune with that blasted hi hat that caused all the problems. That's why I said it was basically well recorded. It was the drummer's playing that made the problem.

If I hadn't been so caught up in how well the session was going, I might have and SHOULD HAVE caught it before I left the studio. I could have asked him to play less hat on the part or to switch the part to a different cymbal. But I didn't catch it until I got ready to mix the song. Sigh, live and learn, right? Thanks to all of you for your help.