Headphone bleed nightmares

[soundinista]

This is my first post, although I've been reading these forums for quite a while now. Thanks to everyone for sharing their knowledge so generously.

Inviting suggestions for a mixdown problem which is currently making me tear my hair out. Working on a record with lots of layered-up BVs and strings, and it seems as if some leaky headphones were in use, because I keep hearing bleed on the tracks, mostly of click track, although occasionally of lead vocal (which is not as problematic). At first I was trying to isolate the problem by muting/soloing tracks, and nearly went nuts, since in some cases found that couldn't hear it on any solo'd track, the problem was subliminal levels of the same thing re-inforcing each other on multiple passes, when un-solo'd. Removed or reduced all compression which isn't strictly necessary, then tried lo-passing everything that could take it, and also a de-esser set to strongest click frequency, and this seems to have worked well for lower sounds such as cello, but isn't working so well on vocals or higher strings, since the pulsing is too evident before the processing is strong enough to be doing what I want.

Also thought I had got the problem under control at one point after hours of finely tweaking all these parameters, then added a little mix compression and it was back - and in all the worst places - the pauses and note-tails where you really want to hear the room ambience. I nearly jumped out the window. You could say, "so don't compress", but if I don't, the mastering engineer will. Any great ideas? Please help me before I self-harm!

[Assistant]

welcome to the forum!

i mixed a song last week that had too much headphone bleed on some tracks and got rid of it with a expander.
have you tried this?

[matt thomas]

Yes expanding is a good idea

You could also spend aaaages editing and automating

you could try finding just one click from the click track and putting it out of phase with the others. Although since it is over lots of tracks and you are using compression this might not work.


You could try Izotope RX noise removal

iZotope RX - Complete Audio Restoration: Declipping, Declicker, Hum Removal, Denoiser, Spectral Repair, Restore, Remaster, Download

whilst it is not the ideal solution, if you spend a bit (a lot) of time with it you should be able to improve things.

narco

[soundinista]

Thanks for your prompt reply! Good suggestion, though it would hurt me to have to do too much of this, since it's quite delicate acoustic music, recorded in a nice big room, with good mics, and the natural stereo ambience I'm getting is beautiful. I know I'll have to sacrifice something, and suspect that the solution is to use very moderate amounts of several different techniques.

Btw, meant to add that I mentioned this to the producer, who is a very experienced classical arranger, and he said that string players often slip one can off when recording, especially if they are not close-mic'd, so they can't turn up their own individual instrument in the monitor mix, so - be warned.

[soundinista]

Like that idea about anti-phase click, though the recording engineer has already done a highly professional job of trimming out silence in the consolidated files. (So if you're so F***ing professional, why is there click all over my audio, you muppet???!!!)

Makes it hard to get a clean sample for noise-reduction tools without also sampling some desirable room ambience after the note-tails. I'm going to request the original recorded files, but was recorded a few months ago, so they may not have them still archived.

Thanks

[Birdi]

Originally Posted by soundinista

. I'm going to request the original recorded files, but was recorded a few months ago, so they may not have them still archived.

Thanks

well, if they are highly professional they should have archived original files. One would hope.

In terms of cans for classical players, the engineer I ocassionaly assist has a set of one eared jobbies for violin and viola players.

hope you find a solution, how frustrating!

Bird

[soundinista]

Going to try this - comments welcome - haven't really thought it through yet:

Since the bleed only becomes unbearable with the addition of compression, but I really want to compress to bring up lovely room ambience, I'll process the tracks a bit harder, using all these suggestions, until I've lost so much ambience that I'm weeping bitter tears, but remove all track and mix compression and replace with parallel compression, taken from before the various processes are applied. Then I'll low pass the hell out of the parallel until I can't hear any more click (maybe de-ess again). Then try to fake some top-end on the ambience with a high-passed reverb plug-in, but probably go for as little of this as can get away with, go for a "dark & moody" sound, and pretend it was an artistic call.

Any views?? Thanks to all.

[dbbubba]

I used to do lot's of string sessions for production music and keeping the click and headphone bleed out of the mics was a must.
The guy who bought the music from me and re-sold it was at the first string session I did and made it abundantly clear how important it was that it was 100% inaudible.

I had to pull multiple versions of mixes and some would really allow the click to be heard if you didn't practice good technique.
I had to remove un-wanted stuff on a few mixes every once in a while.
I also recorded a very good session player who played guitars, violin, mandolin, dobro, steel guitar, etc... and his head must have been porous because click ALWAYS bled through.
I'd have to mute the click in the holes and at the end of cuts.

The suggestions above might work.
The reverse phase thing might work, but since the click is coming from several sources (mics) it might not work 100%. Ya' never know.

I feel your pain brother!
I feel your pain.

[soundinista]

Thanks - I'm feeling the love and it helps - my shotgun remains in the cupboard for now. Honestly though, the orchestral tracks are sounding gorgeous apart from this (big wooden-floored room, Coles Ribbons...AAAAAHHHH...), and if I end up having to sacrifice loads of top-end and compression...my first thread may be my last.

Keep thinking there's some kind of smart-assy multiband compression thing I can do, but I truly, deeply hate bringin MB into a mix, because whenever I do, I seem to spend half my time coming back to it, making tiny tweaks, then wasting more time trying to decide whether it has made any significant difference or not. Too many damn parameters. Sheer laziness/sloppy grasp of theory, probably, but I charge per-mix, not per-hour, and, without exception, ALWAYS underestimate hugely, as it is. My studio-tan is coming along beautifully, and I'm not sure I would recognise all of my children right now.

C'mon, fairy godmother - I know you are on here somewhere. Pleeeese...just make it go away.

[Jules]

I had a session booked in to re track a bunch of R&B vocals.

The previous engineer had allowed way too much backing track bleed into the vocal mic from headphone bleed..

..and a VIP remixer threw the tracks back at the label's face saying they couldn't work with em because of all the clatter from the drums that was audible on the vocal tracks..

Ironically the engineer that came with the session to retrack didn't seem to really know what they were doing with a TubeTec compressor I owned at the time and there was a serious risk that the clients were going to get the SAME PROBLEM until I pointed out that they were over compressing and (again) getting a lot of bleed..

The singers dreadlock / hair braids didnt help the situation either - it can be tricky to to get a tight seal around the ear with headphones on that kind of hair style sometimes.. But hairstyle or not some singers simply lift headphone ear cushions so they can hear themselves better, and thats a disaster waiting to happen.. especially if the material is to be remixed.. with all that bleed is getting into a heavily compressed mic.. You need to keep a watch for that - if they ARE doing that you can ask them to press the unused headphone cushion BEHIND their ear so it closes against SOMETHING and cuts down on sound escaping..

[soundinista]

Found something which seems to be helping, using phase (thanks 2 narco). No easy fix here, because of multiple tracks and mics with different distances between them, but in some cases the same players have overdubbed extra parts - we only had a quartet of string players. They didn't change positions between takes, so flipping the polarity on every 2nd take seems to helping, and doesn't seem to be to the detriment of the actual recorded playing, since the parts are obviously not identical, even when they are simply doubles of previous ones.

What's a shame about this though, is that in addition to the Coles, there was also a pair of SDCs, and a mid-side pair of AKG414s in the room with all mics open on all takes, and I had been looking forward to experimenting with using the different qualities of these when layering up the parts to get a fuller sound, and to differentiate the extra parts, so this approach forces me to choose one pair per instrument and stick with it. Doesn't help with BVs though, because they weren't sitting down, obviously, so the distance is changing.

Not so happy with parallel compression trick either - helps with bleed, but I'm not so far getting as nice a mix as I had with track compression (Btw, don't want anyone to think that I'm only having problems because I'm slamming the compression - it's just that some songs are pretty quiet and spacious, so even tiny noises are jumping out, and the repetitive nature of the click means that even when you don't notice it at first, it worms its way into your attention eventually). And it's also forcing me to use a lot more automation to control small level inconsistencies.

I'm having a bad day here. Actually I probably knew there were no magic mix gymnastics anyone could suggest to help me out of this. I think I'll just settle for sympathy...I've been alone in here way too long on a nice sunny day, which is pretty unusual in this pathetic excuse for a British summer, and I'm feeling very, very sorry for myself. Thanks for your kindness and support.

[bgrotto]

A lotta singers sing with one ear outta the cans; this can lead to bleed problems as well. If that was the case, the engineer shoulda panned the backing track or click to the side he/she is listening to.

Also, automating the click while you're tracking can be helpful in keeping it under control. As far as what to do for the mix, you may hafta just minimize it as best you can and live with the leftover bleed. If the regions are clean in that they're silenced when the singers aren't singing, that's probably the best you can do.

It's not your job to keep the headphones from bleeding during tracking, only to minimize the problem as best you can and move on. Explain this to the client/label/engineer/whoever else needs to hear it and suggest re-tracking.

[Crash]

We have gone to in-ears, especially for drummers. Those guys have click slamming and with ears it just makes life easier on everyone with less click needed for them due to isolation and cleaner tracks for me.

I just got done with a mix (recording done elsewhere) where I was ridding of click on the drum OH tracks. This one was fairly easy as you could only hear it in the quiet breaks of the tunes but...

With headphones, it always seems to be a balancing act.

[soundinista]

I fear that if I suggest re-tracking after all that overdubbing, involving 20 or so session players, they'll suggest something extremely impolite. In fact I know that. There just aren't those kind of budgets being thrown around here these days, except for a priveliged few. Of course I could just brutalise it and slap on loads of convolution reverb, it's just a heartbreaker to get something like this, where the room and the mics, are doing all the work for me which I usually have to fake up on dry, unispiring recordings, and have to treat it like some regular old small-space, close-mic'd thing.

Never mind. I've given up on it for a day or two, beginning to worry now that this click actually exists inside my own head. Maybe no-one else will hear it.

I'm now thinking of changing the topic on this thread to: does anyone know someone in London who'll administer a really severe and savage beating for a reasonable price?