Inherited a project where the drummer consistently, without fail, hits the hats or ride ~just~ before the snare, so when I try to gate the snare or compress the OHs it I get a nice little "FWWT" sound in every snare hit.
I can go manually remove it from the tracks but it's quite tedious and there are many songs on this project haha. I'm thinking someone much smarter than me must have figured out how to automate this or speed it up to some degree.
Thanks!
Use a trigger or replace the snare hits with a clean one using tab to transient
Sonnox drum gate
Love that plug. What a godsend
Use a filter on the sidechain of the snare gate so it's not as sensitive to high frequencies.
Or get good with tab to transient and clean up in front of the snare hits.
You can easily remove it from the snare mic by gating it. The overheads are a bit more tricky. You can duck them just before the snare hits if you use the gated snare as the sidechain and also add negative delay to it. So the overheads duck right before the snare hit but not on the hit itself.
This is exactly what I was trying to figure out. Thanks for the tip.
On shell mics I like to create MIDI from the audio that I then use to create key spikes to send to the sidechain on my gates. Makes the gate react consistently and accurately as I’ve made sure the MIDI is dead accurate to every hit on the drum.
Keyspikes, my beloved
Sidechain the snare into the overheads, but play the audio in REVERSE. Then bounce it and reverse it again back to normal. Can sidechain into dynamic EQ for added precision.
Maybe one of the other ones, run it backwards through the plugin then reverse it again.
Edit: typed these and realized I misread it.
Have you tried side-chaining the snare into the overheads? Use a long release to duck the cymbals behind the snare a bit, delayed or slow attack to bring out the transient in space or faster attack to lazer beam it onto the snare.
Longer release on channel compressor
Compress the drum bus before dialing channel compression
Own it; it’s a human performing, after all. Even it out (over time) with a bit of subtle EQ. Separate the instruments in space.
Dynamic EQ might work really well, especially with a longer release. Don’t use spectral cut mode or you will lose clarity on the rest of the notes and raise your noise floor.
Sidechain the snare into the dynamic EQ
Not sure what software you are working in, but the Strip Silence feature in PT may be what you are after.
Literally dealing with this on an album mix project this week. Great drumming, great sounds, but the player's feel puts the hat just on the front edge of the snare hit. Even with decent separation in the snare mics, it's still enough to throw off gates and introduce that annoying click on a third or more of the hits. I ended up manually editing those blips out of the snare close mic where I heard/saw them. Tedious, but effective.
As far as the overheads go, I typically like to soften higher-freq pokey transient info a bit. My go-to for that has been Spiff for a while. Let's me take the very edge off those stick/cymbal hits without touching the actual punch/weight of the transients.