Q for DFHS users and "Real" drum mixers

[EtherForBreakfast]

I'm just curious if in the "real" world of tracking acoustic drums if many people attenuate the direct hat mic, minimize the leakage/bleed of the hat mic, and lower the kick bleed into OH almost entirely and allow just a small amount into the room mics?

I've been listening very critically to my renders from DFHS (soloing out each track) and this is what I've been tweaking.

Just wondering if this is common. The kick is ANNOYING when it's in the overheads, even just a little bit. I've tried all of the time correction and such, but prefer it with zero OH and about 15% room.

 

[STINNETT]

That is exactly what I do to real drums when I want a tight sound.

I'll Isolate the kick as much as possible when tracking, and cut alot of low frequency out of the overheads. Sometimes I'll high pass the overheads at 500 to 750 Hz.

 

[006]

For DFHS, I usually turn the bleed completely off for everything first. Then depending on the type of music, I'll turn bleeding on for different things, accordingly. For real drums, I do pretty much the same exact thing as MetalHead28. It helps to have good quality gating beforehand though. Good luck with DFHS.

~006

 

[Black neon bob]

With DFHS, i leave everything on.. all mics, and let everything bleed.. i use a sample on the kick though, so no need to use the ambience mic on that one.. only thing i really hate is the ride cymbals.. if i dont use the AMB mic on that one, it sounds weak to me, but when i leave it on, it get's drown in the drummix quite a bit.. so i just turn up the volume and deal with it..

 

[EtherForBreakfast]

006 - You are speaking of the main edit window and you just take the sliders down for OH/AMB and such? Do you ever use the FADE functions? 1.5.3 seems to have fixed quite a few bugs I was having. I was on the fence and juggling back and forth from BFD to DFHS, but DFHS wins out in sound quality. BFD is just so fucking easy, but nothing worth having should be easy. =)

I was shocked to learn that some guy did not even know about the offline bounce feature and was just exporting his shit using playback mode/whatever he had mic wise/bleed wise in the matrix window. Youch.

Metalhead - thanks for that, that's pretty much what I figured. When the kick is in oh and room is just way too "big" and def leppardy/somewhat gay. I'm really trying to nail the Shadows Fall kick right now - i love that kick.

 

[EtherForBreakfast]

With DFHS, i leave everything on.. all mics, and let everything bleed.. i use a sample on the kick though, so no need to use the ambience mic on that one.. only thing i really hate is the ride cymbals.. if i dont use the AMB mic on that one, it sounds weak to me, but when i leave it on, it get's drown in the drummix quite a bit.. so i just turn up the volume and deal with it..

El Bob... You use offline bounce then, right? You just leave everything as is and then tweak the rendered .wavs?

That is what I've been doing all along but since I'm not using sampled kick, I'm trying to get the DFHS kick (dw's mostly) to sound good and tight.

 

[Noumenon]

I always leave the Bleed on, but that's mostly to get used to bleeding and how to deal with it.

 

[Black neon bob]

Le Ether,

Nah man, i have not even tried the offline bounce yet.. i am going to though, when all my mixes are final, and when i can find space on my hard-discs! haha..

When i begin, i leave the AMB mic off.. just takes a lot of RAM whilst recording, so i leave that off for the moment.. i do process all the toms, snare, kick, OH, AMB, etc when i record.. i need that feel at the spot to make out if it's good or not.. so i can mix it a bit when recording i guess..

Do you really benefit from bouncing offline? does it sound better? i am curious, never tried it yet..

 

[Genius Gone Insane]

You can't bounce offline with DKFH2 can you?

 

[EtherForBreakfast]

Bob - in my case yes because I only have the OH mics ticked when tracking/programming. So after the offline bounce the drums are enormous.

If you have never tried the offline bounce, you owe it to yourself. Just do a small portion of a track 20 or 24 bars or so - you'll freak.

I reckon if you had approximately 6GB of RAM, lol, you could load a full kit, including all cymbal slots with all bleed on and play it all back through RAM.

 

[EtherForBreakfast]

You can't bounce offline with DKFH2 can you?

GGI - I am not sure.. It's been a long time since my battery/dfh1 days.

I dont think DFH2 has the same offline feature that superior does, but I could be wrong.

 

[cameltoe]

006 - You are speaking of the main edit window and you just take the sliders down for OH/AMB and such? Do you ever use the FADE functions? 1.5.3 seems to have fixed quite a few bugs I was having. I was on the fence and juggling back and forth from BFD to DFHS, but DFHS wins out in sound quality. BFD is just so fucking easy, but nothing worth having should be easy. =)
.

What do you mean about BFD being "easy". To easy to get a good sound? How is that a bad thing?

 

[006]

I think he means easy to use. As in easy to setup and program, render out, whatever. DFHS is much more extensive in my opinion, and it is more difficult to use at first, as in setting your kits up, and all the features that it has to offer, but once you get it down it slays.

I don't turn the bleed completely off really, I just turn it all off when I build a kit. Then I turn different bleeds on, according to the music. Like I don't have toms bleeding into anything for metal stuff, or the kick into the overheads. For bluesy stuff there's more bleed since it just sounds more...bluesy like that. For jazz, all the bleed is on. For rock music (Ice Wizards), I give it that "def leppardy/somewhat gay" bleed so that the drums sound huge, and I use the ambience mic very specifically to taste. I just start with no bleed at all at first so that I can listen in and figure out what I want to bleed into what. And I turn it on in the construct window to taste. I go about it much similar to how I start off a project at the studio. I will gate drums differently according to the music. Usually when metal bands come in, I will gate the toms just so that they are isolated as hell, and then no kick drum in the overheads is fun to get. It's soo much easier with DFHS since you can simply turn it off or on. I wish it were that easy with a set of mics in a studio!

Ether, how in the hell do you bounce offline? The playback/record thing gets really annoying for all the music I mess around with all the time.

~006

 

[EtherForBreakfast]

Cameltoe - 006 did the splainin' for me. There is nothing wrong with BFD, but DFHS does own it.

006 - how do you mean how the hell do I bounce? How is it actually done with DFHS, or?!?!

All ya do is just continue on past the sample edit page onto the the bounce screen. You hit the R button to arm DFHS, then you play your material back. DFHS will record all of the data, and then you pick a dir. where you want the .WAV's to be saved and yer done.

Think of offline bounce as the sound you would get if you were to hit that "SELECT ALL" button in the bottom right corner of bleed matrix, the one that would require about 8GB of RAM to play in realtime...

 

[006]

Oh sorry, I thought you meant something else. My bad.

~006

 

[neverpurify]

on a related note - toontrack has announced a new simplified version of DFHS. Check it out at www.ezdrummer.com