Push the mic thru a Styrofoam cup until you’re about midway thru. Tape it. You can take it a step further and place foam around the cup. Just make sure it doesn’t hinder the drummer.

After tracking, take the snare drum track, patch it into a gate with a side chain. Take an equalizer, patch that into the side chain of the gate. Turn down the high frequencies. Turn down the low frequencies. This will make the gate insensitive to those extraneous frequencies. Now gate the snare drum properly by adjusting your threshold so that the gate only opens when the snare drum is hit. And voilà! You can now equalize the snare drum to taste and mix it in with everything else.

And yes, you can do the above within software also.

Who let the dog out?
Ms. Remy Ann David

RemyRAD beat me to my reply, but before we get into gating, what mic are you using??? Could it be omni or bi-polar??
Best case should be a dynamic cardioid.

Pass on the styrofoam cup. It wont hold beer when youre done. :roll:

benny wrote: What are some techniques for reducing splashy hihat bleed in the snare mic during tracking?
Benny

1)Punch the useless motherF**ker in the face.

2) Move the mic to the OTHER SIDE of the drum.

3) Kick the hapless, useless skin-banger in the leprechaun

4) put a small gobo over the mic...like an elizabethan collar for a toy dog

that's a good start.

dwoz

TVPostSound wrote:

Pass on the styrofoam cup. It wont hold beer when youre done. :roll:

i have used this technique lots of times and it works great as long as the mic isnt omni.

of course beer can be an essential part of tracking when you work with drummers.

second thought save the cups.

Axis

Yea are you sure that the snare is on axis and that the hi hats are off axis? Use a gate.

The first thing you should do is, assuming you're using a cardiod mic, is to place the mic so that it is facing as close to exactly opposite of the hi hat as possible. This will allow the mic's null point to naturally reject the majority of hi hat bleed. If you do this while tracking, you should be in good shape when it comes time to mix. You'll never completely get rid of the bleed from the hi hat while tracking, but if you use proper mic placement, you should end up pretty close.

my guess is that your not getting enough drums out of the overheads.
use recordermans overhead micing tecnique,that way you will get much more of the drums it self into the drum mix.
so the snare would stand out naturally over the hats!
search the forum for the recorderman tecnique.
try it and please dont gate the snare!!!
8-)

Dan_Pence wrote: place the mic so that it is facing as close to exactly opposite of the hi hat as possible. This will allow the mic's null point to naturally reject the majority of hi hat bleed.

This sounds good in theory, but I've never been able to get it to work because in order to do it, you either have to place the mic closer to the HH (which makes it louder), or it is so obtrusive to the snare drum that it gets in the drummer's way.

Granted, I'm just now starting to get the hang of good drum micing, but can you elaborate on how you accomplish this? Preferably with photos?

what mic are u using? 57 or d1 shouldnt get in the way....

twon

I'm using a 57.

The best cure like it has been said is to place the mic in a position to reject the hi hat by pointing the null of the mic in the direction of the hi hat.

BUT...sometimes were aren't so lucky and have a drummer that crowds his snare with his hats and toms so getting a mic in their can be tricky.

OR....

Another way to do it if you don't like using a gate.....edit out the audio between the snare hits then fade out the tail end of each of your edits. Without doing the fades you'll hear a little choppiness goin' on.

It is a really long and boring process, but I've been able to get more "natural" results as opposed to using a gate.

I'm gate illiterate....it's usually hit or miss for me.

Dynamic Mics

I had the same problem for soooo long, then I realized that I was micing the snare drum with a Shure SM-57, this is an excelent DYNAMIC MIC, so it's very directionable. Try to place the mic in a position where the hi hat is in the absolute back, so it interfieres the least with it's feild. This should give you less hit hat-bleeding problems, or else, it will give you the possibillity of uing a gate to totally eliminate hi hat bleeds in your snare mic

what if i have the oposite problem??? too much snare in my hi hat???

where is your hat mic and what are you using?

twon

answer

if you have too much snare in your hh mic, that means you're not placing it correctly, it has to be placed in a way that if your mic diagphram was a laser gun, the laser would pass through the hh from the total opossite side and hit the middle of the snare drum, this way you'll get the least amount of bleeding from the snare into your hh mic (I recomend using small diagphram mics for this matter)

In my case, as a mixer, i usualy don´t track all job that i get here.
I´d prefer slicing the audio as using the gate. It has a much more natural sound.

Right now, i´m mixing a music with a snare track with FULL of hihat with a very incomodative sound. I just can´t add (or let) highs for the snare, while the hihat is just in the face and bad sounding.
In this case, i´m slicing every snare hit to work separately hi-hat and snare.
I usually even let the hi-hat mic on the mix. I usually use overs to that. It gets a more soft and natural sound too. In this mix i´m working on, they even recorded the hi-hat. So, the only way is to use overs and try to save the snare drum.

Best Regards,

Daniel Farjoun
http://www.musilab.com.br

HH/Snare issues

The best way to get rid of HH in a snare mic is to use your null angle as has already been said. As a drummer, I know that this is not always possible because the hats need to be a bit farther away from the snare than I usually prefer them. All I can say is try to get it as close at possible. If it's not perfect, then gate and edit and eq. But the cleaner you can get it before it's on signal processing and editing, the better.

As for getting snare out of HH. First of all, I would put a low cut or roll-off filter on if the mic has it. Then, I would just point the diaphragm away from the snare, but still on the top hat (probably no more than 45 degrees from the vertical). If it's too steep of an angle, you won't get a good tone from the hats and the drummer will get upset that there is a mic in the way of his/her drumming. After using this mic technique, you can try gates and editing and eq to better eliminate the snare.

SM57 is a great snare mic.
to stick with Shure, I'd say an SM 81 works well for HH, but definitely a small diaphragm condenser.

HH/Snare issues

The best way to get rid of HH in a snare mic is to use your null angle as has already been said. As a drummer, I know that this is not always possible because the hats need to be a bit farther away from the snare than I usually prefer them. All I can say is try to get it as close at possible. If it's not perfect, then gate and edit and eq. But the cleaner you can get it before it's on signal processing and editing, the better.

As for getting snare out of HH. First of all, I would put a low cut or roll-off filter on if the mic has it. Then, I would just point the diaphragm away from the snare, but still on the top hat (probably no more than 45 degrees from the vertical). If it's too steep of an angle, you won't get a good tone from the hats and the drummer will get upset that there is a mic in the way of his/her drumming. After using this mic technique, you can try gates and editing and eq to better eliminate the snare.

SM57 is a great snare mic.
to stick with Shure, I'd say an SM 81 works well for HH, but definitely a small diaphragm condenser.

sm 94 works well on hats with a high-pass filter on it...

twon

Figure8 can be you savior on hats.

First, try and reason with the drummer and get some 'air' in the space so the 'null' will work for you. Not possible?That figgers....it IS a drummer after all.

Second try and reason with the drummer and get him/her to use a softer blend of trashcan lid for the hats. This will lessen the intrusiveness of the hats and actually sound BETTER on a recording. After all, this is a recording and the hats dont have to spike through a bunch of pink noise on a small sweaty stage competing with triple rectum-fryers and the like.

Oh, this isnt going to work either. Probably its the reasoning thats failing.

In this case use dwoz' suggestions.

If you have access to something other than a 57, like a Neumann 184, use that on top of the snare. At least the initial attack of the snare hit will get you something substatial to edit with later.

Also use dwoz' suggestion.

How often do you guys mic the hi-hat? I usually just let the overheads take care of that.

There is a solution which can work if you have the space - there are Mic covers made from acoustic foam by Auralex designed for this very purpose that slip over the body of the mic and are better than the styro cup which will be needed for the beer after all. (Or you could soak the acoustic foam in beer and stuff it in the drummers mouth) :shock:

Recorderman setup?

Is the original thread on the Recorderman drum mic setup archived somewhere. I did a search. Turned up a bunch of threads that refer to it, but the links don't work. Anyone have a link to the original thread?