Need HELP miking toms

[KristjanParticipant]

Hey everyone. How would you mic toms to minimize bleed? I'm trying to record drums for my band and everything works great except for the toms. There is too much bleed in them. We are recording a fast song where the drummer is playing a very fast groove on the rack toms and the floor tom and they bleed into each other. thoughts?

• This topic was modified 4 years ago by Kristjan.

[Magnus JohanssonParticipant]

Some questions do arise reading about your problem. Is the problem mechanical? It do sound a bit strange with such problems between rack and floor toms. Are the toms mounted in a cage? I have experienced problems with mechanical bleed through kick to rack tom and cymbal to tom mounted on cymbal stand.
What more you can try..
Use samples, if you rather not to.. consider using samples of the current kit you are playing.
Move mics closer to the heads, you might get a different sound bit you should get less bleed.
Use dynamic mics. Had a client that brought his own really nice sounding condenser tom mics. In the kit though, only useable to trigger samples.
Feed the gate/expander with triggermics.
Try duplicating the tomtracks, filter them one for highs, initial stick, another for boom, body. Gate them seperately, short release for the high, long release for the low.

[Guido tum SudenKeymaster]

Everything Magnus said.
Also, consider why the bleed is bothering you, when it's mainly the other tom that causes the problem.
Is it the timing of the drummer and you will audibly separate some tom tails when quantizing the tracks? Then think about samples or record the toms separately.
Is it because you need to gate each tom a lot? Think about shortening the initial tom sound (tuning, tape, moon gel…).
Is it because you need to change the tom sound of each tom quite a lot while mixing? Try to get each tom sound as close to the sound you want on the recording.

[Todd GreenwoodParticipant]

Hi Kristjan

I don't know how many inputs you have for your drums.   If you are just using a two channel interface, I can see that you are facing a challenge.   I'm way to lazy for that so I have ten channels going in.   But as for dealing with tom bleed what I generally do with the toms is I close mic them the same as I would in a live situation.   With each tom on it's own channel I go to my tracks and on that track I delete everything that is recorded on it except for the tom hit.  So in my DAW (Reaper) the track looks blank except for where I want the 'noise' from each tom.

Looking forward to hearing how you make out.

Good luck

Todd

 

 

 

 

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