Feb 10, 2009 01:51 pm Bleed through is inevitable when your micing up drums. Mic placement can help minimize it and using gates can help keep your tracks a little cleaner. Here are a few tricks I use:
Your overheads will pick up the whole kit but thats ok, I usually eq overheads to favor the cymbal frequencies and not the drums that are going to be close miced.
when close micing the drums, keep the mic pointing at the center of the drum head where the sweet spot is. this will help make gating easier, especially if you have a good drummer that can hit the drum properly in the center of the head consistently.
Keep in mind the surrounding drums when setting up a close mic because it may be pointing in the direction of another drum. As an example, a mic on a rack tom thats pointing strait downward is likely to be pointing at the snare as well. that could sometimes come through as loud or even louder that the actual tom does.
If you want all of the drums to be completely separated, gating will work pretty well, and depending on how much time you are willing to spend in post production and how fabricated the recording needs to be, you can always manually gate by splitting and fading all of the particular drum hits after they are recorded.
Im sure others will have some good stuff, those are just a few that come to mind.
Also, check out the 3-mic 'recorderman' setup for drums and start with that as a basis and then add your close mics on top of that. That will at least get your kick and OH's in phase which will help with the attack. I'm sure the recorderman setup is covered extensively in this forum.
