reducing live sounding room on Snare track
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Posted on Mar 14, 2006 06:59 am
Kaos62
Kaos is only a form of insanity
Member Since: Feb 03, 2005
Ok last weekend I started recording drum tracks for our bands demo. Now all is pretty mediocre, but I have one issue i cannot seem to resolve.
The Snare track is too live sounding. It sits at the back of the mix no matter what I do. I have lowered the Overheads in the mix & this reduces it somewhat. I have altered the eq and compressed as normal but still cant seem to bring it up enough. It is almost as though it has too much reverb on it. (natural room sound)
any ideas?
Cheers then
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bbbitterI'm back bitches!!!Member
Since: May 27, 2004
Mar 14, 2006 07:23 am Usually with my overheads, I cut somewhere between 250 and 500 Hz. Try putting a fairly narrow notch somewhere in that band and sweep it back and forth till it cuts the most of what you don't want. That's about all I can tell you. Hope that helps.
Mar 14, 2006 01:00 pm yeah getting rid of the room is pretty trickey, i'd start by building the mix around that room reverb, and make everything 'blend' more with it, it'll sound wierd if you have a concert hall kick with a small room snare....try to hide the sound by blending in the other reverbs with it....as for more punch to bring it up, compression and better yet, tape saturation are your friends, careful though, cuz the room will come up right with it...
Mar 14, 2006 02:16 pm It's a matter of gating. If you've got the compression tweaked well, you'll get a good signal whether your drummer hits it hard or softly. But you've gotta use a gate to cut off the signal UNLESS you get a signal from the snare.
The gate will keep that track off until an input signal is loud enough, then cut it back off once that snare's signal is soft enough again. This will kill the over ringing and ambient room noise. Then, you can bring that snare way up in the mix, but the reverb will be nonexistent.
TadpuiI am not a crook's headMember
Since: Mar 14, 2003
Mar 14, 2006 02:43 pm ^^^ what Bryan said :)
Gating was the one thing that made the most pronounced difference when I was doing my first (and really only) drum mix. It really allows you to separate the sound from the others and opens the door for more effective compression on the kick and snare.
Josh RoseJR ProductionsMember
Since: Mar 03, 2005
Mar 14, 2006 02:53 pm Gating for sure doesn;t hurt. This is the one thing that really cleaned up the mud in my drum mixes, and made the snare really pop. If you go to www.digitalfishphones.com/ and get the FLOORFISH you should be set. It has some great pre-sets that automaticly gate snare, bass drum, toms, hihats, and some others. Also, the controls are fairly simple if you want to tweak them a little bit. Also check out the BLOCKFISH and endorphin plug ins. And of course, they're all free :)
Josh
Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
Mar 14, 2006 09:45 pm Kaos, do you have the snare mic going to its own track? If so you need to work that particular track over to get the best snare sound you can out of that track. Then you can proceed to set it right in the mix.
Kaos62Kaos is only a form of insanityMember
Since: Feb 03, 2005
Mar 15, 2006 08:22 am Thank you all for the input each and everyone has given me ideas to work with.
Noise I do have the snare on a seperate track (As I now have the ability thanks to ESP1010 LOL)
Tad, Bryan i have started to gate the snare but it is tricky as I don't want to lose too much of the feel (ghost notes etc...) Oh & by the way I am the drummer as well.
Chris, I ill certainly look at the tape saturation idea
Josh, will down load and give them a go
BBB, That has certainly helped.I passed a couple of times with different freq's and it is starting to make a difference
Noize2uCzar of MidiAdministrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002
Mar 15, 2006 07:33 pm Kaos, you can as well apply the gate in your recording application. I find sometimes that is the best way to take some time to get it absolutely correct.
Mar 20, 2006 12:39 am Have you checked for phasing? Out of phase recordings can suck the body out of the snare sound and leave nothing but room. The overheads need to be in phase with each other as well as the snare mic(s). Test the phase by switching between mono and stereo playback. If it seems louder in stereo, then there is probably a phasing problem.
If the phase is ok you can remove some room with EQ (try sweeping around 400hz). You can also find specific room resonances and use a very narrow Q to eliminate those precise frequencies. Listen to hear if there is a certain pitch that always rings in the room. Find that pitch on the eq (there may be several pitches, harmonics of the room) and see if it helps to remove it. Sometimes you can surgically pull those frequencies down without affecting the overall sound too much.
Hope that helps. I'm no expert, but I've been recording a lot of drums lately and had a similar problem.
