Hello GavinMajesty.................

Reading your post its sounds as if your (renting) paying for studio time to record your drums. Enginnering your own recording.

I'm not a full time studio owner, but been in this for along time. On both sides of the industry. As a musicain an a recording/mix engineer. So someone that dose this full time for there living will have a better answer than mine. That being said..............

It sounds like you should have worked on your mic placement. You will always have mic bleed, but you should be able to get a good drum mix.
Mic placement is everthing, IMHO. And how well the drummer plays.

I usally spend more time on mic placement with drums than I should.
That being said, I want the drums set up atleast a hour before time to track the drums.

I know that don't help you much now. But I was thinking you might have the time to re-track the drums.

I don't worry about mic bleed that much with drums. I tend to think of it as captureing a preformance. You can use EQ to take out what you don't want, It usally brings out what you want.

Peace............Scoobie

I'll answer that with another story:
We wanted to take pictures of our studio for a brochure. We took some pics ourselves, but it didn't look pro enough. So we hired a long time aquaintance photograhper that charged us a minimal price. We showed him pics from magazines that had the level of detail we were looking for. Pics came back less than steller. Most were just not even close to being useable. (barely slightly better that what we took ourselves) I spent some time with the few good ones and photoshop. (Ok- I spent a LOT of time with photoshop) Tweeking and shapeing and tweeking. In the end, it still didn't look right.
What to do? Do we bring back the photographer and tell him we weren't happy. (he did give us a really good rate) OR do we hire someone else? OR do we use the best that we could get with photoshop?
We decided that the photoshop option was at best a salvage operation. There's no way to make a pro product out of poor workmanship.
So we decided to do the whole shoot over again with a new photographer that charged us an arm and a leg. But the result was much much better.
So if quality is essential, you need to have quality workmanship. Anything else works against you, not for you.
hope this helps.

Drumagog basically uses noise gates to cut out the unwanted sound and replace or combine the original with the sample. So if noise gates arn't working for you to isolate, then Drumagog will not help. You can get a demo of Drumagog and try it though. I'm not sure about DKFH but I'd bet it goes about things the same way.

Microphone placement, as mentioned, is very important. Also, what microphones are you using?

If you are new to recording drums then I would agree with natural and hire someone who is experienced to at least get the sounds for you.

SkamaWhoHa wrote:
If you are new to recording drums then I would agree with natural and hire someone who is experienced to at least get the sounds for you.

That's the irony.

I didn't touch mic placement, recording or engineering of drums for that reaosn.

The studio owner did EVERYTHING regarding drums.

Drumkit from hell superior is a midi based drum sampling program with a lot of multi samples and mic bleed.
My idea is use Sonar to extract midi performance from each mic and sample in superior so i can get the drummer's performance with usable bleed and also good kit sounds.

Ok

Keyword: Responsible? hahaha

Sounds like you have a cymbal-basher for a drummer. Shoulda turned the overheads & hihat mics up louder in the drummers ears while tracking. Maybe even close-mic the cymbals just for the headphone mix. At some point, a drummer needs to figure out that they need to play their instrument in the proper balance that they want to hear, rather than bash away and assume that each drum and cymbal will end up separated on their own track to be mixed together at will. Seriously, I've had drummers think the mics somehow magically isolate each drum/cymbal from the rest of the kit.

First off, what is your description of "bleed"? I don't think that I've ever tracked a drum kit without some bleed. There is certainly 'good' and 'bad' bleed; how many tracks are you having a problem with? Did the engineer track every mic to it's own track, or was it a "mult" that you are now dealing with? Did you discuss your expectations with the engineer ahead of time?
I have tracked a good deal of players who wanted to do the live drum and loud guitar amps in my room, and then take them back to their studio for dubbing/mixing. I would NEVER want to let anything go out the door with my name associated with it if it wasn't the best that it could be. There have been times where I have had to tell a band that the drummer was too sorry to bother with the project. So, did you tell this dude that you aren't happy with the results? If so, what was his/her reply? This clearly needs to be addressed...tactfully, but addressed nonetheless.

gavin, was everything close mic'd ??

to really help you we'd need to hear individual track and or pics of the set up.

Reggie wrote: Sounds like you have a cymbal-basher for a drummer. Shoulda turned the overheads & hihat mics up louder in the drummers ears while tracking. Maybe even close-mic the cymbals just for the headphone mix. At some point, a drummer needs to figure out that they need to play their instrument in the proper balance that they want to hear, rather than bash away and assume that each drum and cymbal will end up separated on their own track to be mixed together at will. Seriously, I've had drummers think the mics somehow magically isolate each drum/cymbal from the rest of the kit.

Agreed, when the cymbals are louder in the tom mics than the toms it must be a cymbal basher.

Sounds typical. Crushes the snare and OH's, but hits the toms and kick like a pansy. The makings of a great drum recording.