Overheads+sampling

[loxrox33]

how do you guys go about overheads ?

do you mic XY or OTYF or whatever it's called spaced pair etc.

what i'm looking for is the best result in an ordinary concrete wall room to get the LEAST amount of snare and kick with the most amount of cymbals that have the lower energy.

joey's mixes always have such thick creamy and low end warmness sounding cymbals yet he gets so much clarity in the kick and snare replacements.

a few assumptions i have made is that number 1. his actual kit that he is using to record sounds quite alot like the samples he uses naturally, so that would lead to a much better mix in with the samples. also he obviously has a good room for it, with the proper amount of obsorbtion, then he has great mics and especially great overheads i think i saw he has a nt2a or something of the like as his rooms, uses his at4040 on hats most of the time i think, so this all adds up.

but with my mixes one of the only things i can struggle to get to commercial standard is overheads.

what are you guys doing post to get them sounding good?

like ive herad u can do some slight limiting etc.

this is what i do. now don't judge me if this si totally out of whack coz i dont know a lot about overhead mixing.

i have an eq high pass up to about 500hz and then some high end boosts 10k and up, then i cut a bit of 3khz for vocals

then i have an l3 multimaximizer pulled down to -5.3, which i think is probably too much limiting on overheads, and then i have it also multibanding the lows.

then i add a C4 and bypass everything but the low and low mid getting rid of the fundamentals of kick and snare.

now this ends up with a usable sound with steven slate samples, BUT.

if i turn it up, i can hear a defined kick and snare seperate from the cymbals and it sounds horrible.

ive been doing it xy lately coz that gives me the best results, but i can never get my cymbals loud enough and still have a good clear sounding kick and snare.

any tips you guys have?

 

[timislegend]

it's ORTF.


you can't really avoid snare but you can hp the kick right out of there.

the best method (or the most common) is to track drums with spaced pair (overheads) and during the mixing stage, you can apply a limiter to the (oh) group... if you are sample replacing and insist on subduing the initial snare drum in the overheads, you can apply a stereo compressor (post limiter) to the (oh) group, then sidechain the replaced (or triggered) snare to the overhead channel. depending on the amount of threshold you apply, this (in combination with limiting) will give you a clean/clear overhead sound.

another way to do this is to simply bring the overheads down in the mix... you'd be surprised how great it can sound with less cymbals hogging the spotlight.

 

[Backe]

just be sure to keep the snare in the middle of the mics no matter how you're miking, atleast so it has roughly the same distance to both mics. I truly hate it when people fuck that up, send me the tracks for mixing and you have to sit for hours using stereo imagers, stereo enhancers and play with volume to create balance.

i think joey actually cuts alot of midrange out of his cymbals to leave room for the "meat" (THE TACT LOL) in his shells and room for vox in the upper midrange, they are really dominant like above 8k somewhere, but they're warm and crisp as fuck, gotta be due to KM184's and that API he's using. he has a fairly high ceiling aswell, which helps alot. I'm also curious to whether he uses plugin saturation on his cymbals sometimes, like The Color Morale's My Devil In Your Eyes, cymbals sound really smashed and warmed, the listen to TDWP's Zombie EP, cymbals sound super sterile!

 

[loxrox33]

yea not a fan of zombie ep, thats just me though it sounds too like spaced and too much shit happening muffles stuff to me

 

[loxrox33]

Hey backe, if you were going to saturate the overheads, what sorta plugin do you reckon? also when you say dominant above 8k you mean cymbals not vocals right?

 

[Backe]

Hey backe, if you were going to saturate the overheads, what sorta plugin do you reckon? also when you say dominant above 8k you mean cymbals not vocals right?

i've been using PSP mixsaturator with great results, also the Nebula preamp impulses can smoothen things out. and yes, i mean the cymbals. it's like e makes a bell boost the make then cut through without being overpowering.

 

[tempe]

One of the biggest things is getting the cymbals high enough to get and even image of the kit, and then have a drummer that can hit the damn things properly! To be honest I've found it better to just get the drums sounding great in the overheads and using that to support the sample replaced sound, rather than trying to eliminate the drums entirely as that is always going to be a compromise.