how to fix cymbal bleed into tom mic with protools?

[Alex]

I ended up with a tom track that has very bad cymbal bleed. I can
minimize the harshness of the cymbal by drawing a volume automation,
but that gives me unnatural feel at certain places. I can remove
everything with the low pass filter and get rid of the high end
frequencies, but I need to eliminate everything above 1300 Hz in order
to eliminate those cymbals. As the result tom sounds like crap. Is
there anything else I can do here?

[Monte P McGuire]

In article >,
Alex > wrote:
>I ended up with a tom track that has very bad cymbal bleed. I can
>minimize the harshness of the cymbal by drawing a volume automation,
>but that gives me unnatural feel at certain places. I can remove
>everything with the low pass filter and get rid of the high end
>frequencies, but I need to eliminate everything above 1300 Hz in order
>to eliminate those cymbals. As the result tom sounds like crap. Is
>there anything else I can do here?

Not really. Gates, like volume automation, can sound unnatural, and
lowpassing won't always work either. The only thing I can think of is
to use the tom track as a guide to creating a triggered sample track.
I think there are some automatic sample replacer programs, but you can
simply pop in a sample manually and use the original track as a timing
guide. It's a little tedious, but it'll work well, as long as your
sampe is somewhat natural sounding.

In general, when there is excessive bleed, it's probably because the
drummer was beating the sh*t out of the cymbals for some unknown
reason. Lots of young players do this and expect us to make it sound
OK. It is possible that a better miking technique could have ended up
with less bleed, but obviously that didn't happen.

Also check to see that any processing you're doing isn't making the
problem worse, such as massive compression on submixed drums or on the
tom track itself. If you have lots of cymbal bleed, don't use the
overhead channels.

Lesson to be learned: make sure your miking setup works well before
you commit it to tracks. Try a test mix first to see if you can get a
good sound and then start tracking. If it doesn't sound good, don't
expect to be able to fix it in the mix. If the tracks aren't yours,
then my sympathies go out to you. Try to see if the band can redo the
tracks using your superior skills. ;-)


Best of luck,

Monte McGuire

[Scott Dorsey]

Alex > wrote:
>I ended up with a tom track that has very bad cymbal bleed. I can
>minimize the harshness of the cymbal by drawing a volume automation,
>but that gives me unnatural feel at certain places. I can remove
>everything with the low pass filter and get rid of the high end
>frequencies, but I need to eliminate everything above 1300 Hz in order
>to eliminate those cymbals. As the result tom sounds like crap. Is
>there anything else I can do here?

Retrack the toms?
Try a broadband noise reduction tool using a cymbal sample?
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

[What's In A Name?]

I just hand edit my toms and the sound works great for my hard rock band. In
other words, I delete all of the time between tom hits and it gives the drum
sound a HUGE big rock feel.

Anthony Gomez
www.inbalancemusic.com

"Alex" > wrote in message
om...
> I ended up with a tom track that has very bad cymbal bleed. I can
> minimize the harshness of the cymbal by drawing a volume automation,
> but that gives me unnatural feel at certain places. I can remove
> everything with the low pass filter and get rid of the high end
> frequencies, but I need to eliminate everything above 1300 Hz in order
> to eliminate those cymbals. As the result tom sounds like crap. Is
> there anything else I can do here?

[LeBaron & Alrich]

Monte P McGuire wrote:

> In general, when there is excessive bleed, it's probably because the
> drummer was beating the sh*t out of the cymbals for some unknown
> reason.

Though incipient deafness is a real possibility.

--
ha

[WillStG]

<< (Alex) >>
>>I ended up with a tom track that has very bad cymbal bleed. I can minimize
the harshness of the cymbal by drawing a volume automation, but that gives me
unnatural feel at certain places. I can remove everything with the low pass
filter and get rid of the high end frequencies, but I need to eliminate
everything above 1300 Hz in order
to eliminate those cymbals. As the result tom sounds like crap. Is there
anything else I can do here? >>

Depends what the tracks sound like. Maybe just use the overheads and
forget the tom mics, eq the overheads so the toms sound good in them. I like
that idea. <g> But besides the other suggestions so far you could try tight
gating on the toms, maybe reverse their polarity if the overheads are mostly
cymbals with little of the rest of the kit to cancel out the cymbals. If you
go that way you might filter the overheads so they have mostly cymbals in them
and not much of the toms.


Will Miho
NY Music & TV Audio Guy
Fox And Friends/Fox News
"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away..." Tom Waits

[geek]

Make a copy of the tom track, invert it (flip the phase), use a pass filter
to scoop everything in the "tom range" out of the inverted track. Bring the
inverted track up until it starts to cancel the bleed. Be careful, you'll
start canceling things you don't want to if you go to hard.

It should take out some of the annoying stuff, without making your tom go
bye-bye.

Good luck,

m.

--


mike rekka at hotmail dot com hates spam


"Alex" > wrote in message
om...
> I ended up with a tom track that has very bad cymbal bleed. I can
> minimize the harshness of the cymbal by drawing a volume automation,
> but that gives me unnatural feel at certain places. I can remove
> everything with the low pass filter and get rid of the high end
> frequencies, but I need to eliminate everything above 1300 Hz in order
> to eliminate those cymbals. As the result tom sounds like crap. Is
> there anything else I can do here?

[jim andrews]

In article >,
says...

> >Try a broadband noise reduction tool using a cymbal sample?
>
> You MIGHT try copying the track..high passing to remove low frequencies...and
> invert the polarity of that track. I did this not long ago to completely remove
> a click recorded with an acoustic guitar..pretty amazing really. Samples must
> line up exactly though.

If a simple polarity flip doesn't get it done, I would think you might
have better success by nudging that flipped track backwards or forwards
in time to more completely cancel the cymbal bleed.

jim andrews
basset sound
austin, tx

[jim andrews]

In article <MPG.19d0b8f549ac9ce989d41@news-server>,
says...
> In article >,
> says...
>
> > >Try a broadband noise reduction tool using a cymbal sample?
> >
> > You MIGHT try copying the track..high passing to remove low frequencies...and
> > invert the polarity of that track. I did this not long ago to completely remove
> > a click recorded with an acoustic guitar..pretty amazing really. Samples must
> > line up exactly though.
>
> If a simple polarity flip doesn't get it done, I would think you might
> have better success by nudging that flipped track backwards or forwards
> in time to more completely cancel the cymbal bleed.

NOTE: this assumes you're inverting the "cymbal tracks" to cancel out
the cymbal bleed on the tom tracks. If you're inverting the high-passed
tom tracks instead, no nudging should be necessary. I'd try both ways
and see what works better.

jim andrews
basset sound
austin, tx

[Mike]

jim andrews > wrote in message news:<MPG.19d0ba19c87cd513989d42@news-server>...
> In article <MPG.19d0b8f549ac9ce989d41@news-server>,
> says...
> > In article >,
> > says...
> >
> > > >Try a broadband noise reduction tool using a cymbal sample?
> > >
> > > You MIGHT try copying the track..high passing to remove low frequencies...and
> > > invert the polarity of that track. I did this not long ago to completely remove
> > > a click recorded with an acoustic guitar..pretty amazing really. Samples must
> > > line up exactly though.
> >
> > If a simple polarity flip doesn't get it done, I would think you might
> > have better success by nudging that flipped track backwards or forwards
> > in time to more completely cancel the cymbal bleed.
>
> NOTE: this assumes you're inverting the "cymbal tracks" to cancel out
> the cymbal bleed on the tom tracks. If you're inverting the high-passed
> tom tracks instead, no nudging should be necessary. I'd try both ways
> and see what works better.
>
> jim andrews
> basset sound
> austin, tx


You could try a frequency sensitive (sidechained) gate on an inversion
of the tom track in order to gate out the tom and therefore improve
what gets cancelled.

Seems to me an inversion of the cymbal track would still make for
funkyness on the tom track since there would still be phase
cancellation during the tom hits.

Mike http://www.mmeproductions.com

[PVP9847]

more often than not, i'll spend a 1/2 hour or so and zoom in on the tom hits
and replace them with samples i'll take of the toms before recording - works
for most kinds of rock or pop stuff

[Rich Wilner]

"What's In A Name?" > wrote in message >...
> I just hand edit my toms and the sound works great for my hard rock band. In
> other words, I delete all of the time between tom hits and it gives the drum
> sound a HUGE big rock feel.

wouldn't this be the same as using a gate?

[Scott Dorsey]

Rich Wilner > wrote:
(Scott Dorsey) wrote in message >...
>>
>> Retrack the toms?
>> Try a broadband noise reduction tool using a cymbal sample?
>
>this would actually probably work pretty well, since the cymbal noise
>probably has a large white component and will be uncorrelated with the
>tom.
>scott, do you know of a tool that does this? should of coding up some
>FFT-based algorithm in MATLAB or something i mean.

It really doesn't work all THAT well, but I have used it to salvage stuff
before. I've only used CEDAR, but most of the noise reduction kits (the
Waves Restoration Bundle seems popular) have some sort of broadband NR.
It takes a very light hand with the thing, though, because it can make
for some weird artifacts if overdone.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."