Found an awesome way to minimize bleed in drum tracks (REAPER)

Erkan

Erkan

mr-walker.bandcamp
Jun 16, 2008
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Listen CAREFULLY to the tom in this soundclip. Focus in on the tom with all your effort, listen to its attack and don't be fooled by the bleed noise. This soundclip contains the same tom looping a couple of times and it alternates between the raw version and the modified "less bleed" version. To my ears, the attack stays pretty much the same. It's like the tom has been pulled away from the rest of the kit a few meters but it still sounds the same as the original, only with less bleed.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/585020/Cyndjent Tom2 Bleed vs less bleed.mp3

If you like what you're hearing, keep reading. It's piss easy to do in REAPER and I just managed to do it right now while editing the drums.

Keep in mind this will probably only work for instruments that have high end in the attack but not in the tail. Perfect for toms, not so perfect for snares (unless you want a very dry snare tail). Should work well for kick drums as well but those usually don't contain that much bleed anyway.

- Put a ReaEQ on the track you want to minimize bleed on.
- Remove all bands and make just one low pass filter on the ReaEQ
- Click on Param -> FX parameter list -> Parameter modulation -> 1-Freq (low)
- A window pops up with the modulation options. Click on "Enable parameter modulation" on the top. Follow the settings on the image below for a decent starting point. Adjust the curve and the release to your taste. More release will yield a "swooooosh" effect on the tom, and less release will be more clean and tight.

Parameter%20Modulation.JPG


The "Minimum" slider below the curve is useful for controlling the sensitivity. If you have the snare track bleeding in on the tom for example and it is triggering the EQ, you can set the "Minimum" parameter high enough to make the snare not trigger the modulation. Alternatively you can sidechain the snare to the tom to push it out of the modulation.
 
I can hear a little bit of swooshing artifcat at the end of the tom. Curious - why wouldn't you just gate it? That's essentially what you've just done right? Only the bleed's still there and with gating the bleed would be completely gone. I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, I'm just wondering what the benefits would be to do this over a normal gate?
 
The advantage of doing it like this is that you don't get that surprise effect from gating.

Let's say you have boosted your toms in the highs and you've added some fat compression and even an exciter. They sound really smacky and just pure tits right? Right... but by this point, the bleed will have been boosted so high that whenever any of your toms open that gate of yours it's gonna go like "OH SHIT LOOK AT ME, I'M TOM #2 AND TAKE OVER THIS MIX NAUUUS!!" and you're suddenly going to be hearing the ride or hihat or whatever cymbal is being played much louder than when the gate is closed.

By doing it this way instead, you can pretty much boost all the crap you want and still get away with it. You could throw a gate on there as well but I like to edit my toms so I just cut out the parts where they don't play instead. Now I can still boost the highs and get a smacking attack but without increasing the bleed. You have to think about what toms are and what you need to do on 'em. A tom doesn't really contain any treble AT ALL, except for the first few ms which is the transient, the attack or the "click" of the tom. The rest of the tom is all mids and bass. So this brings up the question of why you would want to boost the treble on areas where it doesn't even have treble? It's just unnecessary and brings up additional noise.

Yeah you will get that swooshing artifact depending on how long release you have and how you have shaped your curve, but with enough tweaking you can get away with it very well. And remember, we are putting this tom under the microscope now - there is no chance you can hear that swooshing in the full drum mix, let alone the full song mix with all other instruments. Really, I've been analyzing it and only the rest of the drums are enough to completely hide it and melt it into the rest of the kit. I find it awesome, and I even tried it on my kick drum just now. Normally I can't get the kind of clicky kick drum sound I want because my kick mic sucks ass, but by filtering the kick so that only the transient has the EQ, I can pretty much boost as much as I need to achieve the sound I'm looking for. I had never been able to do that before.
 
egan. said:
You lost a bunch of high end on the attack of your tom though.
Click to expand...

I'm not so sure about that really, are you sure you're not being fooled by the absense of bleed? I think the brain will automatically think the one with less bleed is also less bright because there aren't as much cymbal noise. Anyhow, that was still a non-EQd version of the tom though. If I did lose some attack, it's very easy to bring it back in after the filtering process.

Check this out: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/585020/bilOVE tom example.mp3

I have obviously not mixed anything seriously (I'm still only 30% done with all the drum editing on the album) but I toyed around a bit and just boosted the highs and... I think the attack is plenty. I can get MUCH more attack than that if I want, without having any surprise gating effects. This is the cleanest and sharpest tom sound I have achieved with natural drums so far. Every time I have tried to do that in the past, I have gotten very obvious "gate opening effects", as in cymbals getting louder because the toms are boosted in the highs.
 
It's not the same thing. An expander boosts the volume when it reaches over a certain threshold right? And if it's below... does it just leave it as is or does it have the option to reduce the volume, sort of like a gate? In any case, the result will not be as good because it doesn't take into account the fact that the tails on tom drums don't have any treble. You still have the problem of boosting the signal on places where it's irrelevant and only damaging to the sound in the end.

You can't simply gate the toms to reduce bleed, because the gate will also cut the tom's tail if it's set too high to kill bleed. If it's set low enough to let most of the tail pass it will also let most of the bleed pass for the duration of the tom's tail. Considering that the tom's tail doesn't have any significant amounts of treble, you can simply low pass the bleed out of the tom while the tom still rings out with it's body. I don't quite see how an expander would let you do this unless it had all of these stages built-in to it.
 
pedantic!

But its a great trick, i am sure its over the top but nevertheless I like your thinking.
 
What i usually do is duplicate my track and put an expander on each. Then I leave one at it's initial setting so it doesn't work, but still induces the same amout of delay than on the other track. I adjust the other track's expander and blend in both. Now I back the bleed a bit since I don't need to have my first track so high any more since the attack is all stored on my second track. If i miss any tom hits in the song, I can still automate my plugins to save the day. What's nice with this trick is that you can compress the fuck out of the second track and will still prevent yourself from boosting the entire bleed. Remember to check how much delay you get from your plugins so that both tracks are still mostly aligned. Good Luck!
 
Erkan said:
It's not the same thing. An expander boosts the volume when it reaches over a certain threshold right? And if it's below... does it just leave it as is or does it have the option to reduce the volume, sort of like a gate? In any case, the result will not be as good because it doesn't take into account the fact that the tails on tom drums don't have any treble. You still have the problem of boosting the signal on places where it's irrelevant and only damaging to the sound in the end.

You can't simply gate the toms to reduce bleed, because the gate will also cut the tom's tail if it's set too high to kill bleed. If it's set low enough to let most of the tail pass it will also let most of the bleed pass for the duration of the tom's tail. Considering that the tom's tail doesn't have any significant amounts of treble, you can simply low pass the bleed out of the tom while the tom still rings out with it's body. I don't quite see how an expander would let you do this unless it had all of these stages built-in to it.
Click to expand...

A downward expander grabs the signal below a threshold and brings it down. It still can have some fancy options like a "listen mode" on wich you can make the expander search in a limited region of the frequency spectrum, so it can look for peaks only in the higher range of the spectrum say 2khz for example. So you can make it look right where the attack of the tom is. This way, any bass or ultra high frequencies that reach the treshold won't make the plugin work. Then you can set a hold time before it starts releasing back and save all of your attack before it releases with the tail of the toms' hit.
 
It's a brilliant idea and shows off reapers ability to make anything triggered by/sidechained to anything else, irrelevant of the design of the plugin.
I don't know of an expander that could do this, unless it was a real multiband expander. The sneap trick works great so long as it's a decent length tom fill with no cymbals ringing in from before it.
 
Yea it's a pretty cool system with the parameter modulations and all that in Reaper. They can be used for tons of shit.

Thought I'd just jump in and post this link to a clip of the drums and how they're sounding so far. Not really mixed but rather "polished up" to give the illusion of a mixed drum kit. It's 100% natural so no samples and shit, just the usual EQ and comp and of course the filtering method I talk about in the first post. I'm pretty sure I would not be able to pull this off without this method because this is the cleanest sounding toms I've gotten in my whole life. I usually end up with a shit ton of bleed otherwise and I then have to resort to sample blending. The kick is also not bad and it too have been filtered by the same process to enable massive high end boost without bleed.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/585020/Drumtest.mp3

Keep in mind I'm using mics that are not worth more than 200$ for the whole kit :)
 
PhilR said:
Figured I'd have a go at this myself, it has to be said the results are pretty impressive!

Here's my sample, containing a before clip with no processing, and after with the modulated low-pass technique and a noise gate.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3000915/tom.wav
Click to expand...

Awesome that it worked out for ya! I was afraid people would have trouble following my "tutorial" but that sounds right :) It's amazing how well it works to filter out bleed, it's just pure awesometits. You can now boost the high end or do whatever you want and it'll still keep the bleed out.
 
abigor731 said:
so what you did was linking the frequency where the low pass kicks in to the volume?
Click to expand...

Exactly, that's the simplest way to look at it and it's exactly what's going on. The higher the volume is, the higher the low pass is set. When the tom is struck, the low pass jumps up to around 24khz essentially letting all of the signal through and rapidly yanks the low pass back to kill the cymbals and stuff in the background. Once again, this works only and only because drums such as toms do NOT contain anything important in the treble region. It's not like it's a fucking sizzling drum head, it's just a plastic film vibrating with a fundamental tone at somewhere around 100hz or something. There is nothing to be had in the 6k region.

Many people seem to have trouble understanding why I won't simply slap a gate on there. A gate kills all of the signal and that includes the tail of the tom. I like to have as much of the tail of my tom as possible so it doesn't cut out weirdly like they do on some mixes. I also delete "silence" on the tom tracks instead of using a gate. I find this yields more desirable results.

I'm not saying you HAVE to use this method or that this method is the "right" way. Whatever floats your boat, right? :) I just found that this gave me the cleanest tom sound I have ever achieved. In fact, it's so clean that I can boost the high end to my liking, without using sample replacement! Win win.
 
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