Lessons

Lesson Info

Bleed Control

And then we have my favorite, my favorite function of the mixer, which I'm going to skip. Why explained everything else. So this is my favorite part. The black bar were about to come back to that causes where your bleed controls are. This is a really cool feature that doesn't exist in real life. By the way that I'm pointing out right now, this is the fade control. The fade control is going to the best way to describe it. It's gonna control sort of the attack sustaining release off this particular channel in a very unnatural way that you could never do in real life. And the best way to show it is to give you an example of it, because again, in conjunction with all the other stuff, we learned about sound shipping earlier. You can create some wild sounds and mix is very cool stuff. And then this is just your basic pan. If you guys don't know what the pan is on a mixer, probably not in the right class right now. But you go hard, left hard, right. Everything's great. You got your face so yo...

u can have things in and out of the phase they were recorded in again. It's relative to the phase recorded right there. You've got solo and mute. Now this mute and this mute are two different things. This mute is going to mute the channel, right? Thats gonna mute that particular channel. This mute is gonna mute all of your bleed coming in which I'm about to show you. All right, so check this out. You click this little black box here, and what you have is your bleed control and what's so super cool about this? And this is like again everyone starting to sit up now engines like, Yes. Okay, so we just discussed how when you actually record something, Bleed is inevitability of recording drums back in the day. Not to wax poetic, But let's talk about Motown. The seven bleed was an essential part of the actual recording process, a za matter of fact sidebar when we went to Muscle Shoals, when went to Fame Studios to record the drums there, a big part of the drum sound that they used to attain there actually was bleed leakage from the other microphones in the studio that had nothing to do with the drums. The piano Mike and the Base Mike and because they were all in the same room playing together at the same time, which is a novel concept, I know. But when we recorded the drums at fame, we actually set up the piano mic on the piano, the bass mike, the guitar mike, all the mikes that would have been present in a session in the room so we could capture that bleed and give you control over it in our mixer because that was a big part of the sound. Never underestimate the power of the drum bleed is we're going to show you. So what Tune Track did is being awesome? Drummer would not be good enough. It had to be superior drummer. So not only do we have to capture the bleed for every instrument in this session, let's just talk about the session in every microphone and create a sample for it. We had to give you complete control over what samples get blend into what microphones at your discretion. That's I wanted, if that's the mere inside the mirror, with two other mirrors and eight Miers going this way in a kitten with laser rise and fire and devil horns and then another mirror reflecting all that into other mirrors. That's how awesome that is. That is a lot of mirrors. So let me give you an example. I'm gonna mute. I'm so I'm gonna solo this kick drum. All right, this is the kick drum in microphone. Now, what you'll see here is kick drum and you'll see that you have this little sort of circle here. And what that means is in the bleed control. Obviously, this kick drum is supposed to be bleeding into. This is supposed to be here. It's so you can't remove that. I can change the level of it, right? So I could change its own bleed. I can't remove it completely unless I do that right, but I bring the bleed back in. But right now, let's say I want the snare to sound a little punch here and now think to yourself about a session recording session. What are the chances on a regular session? Often engineer, putting a microphone inside of a kick drum and not getting snare oblique. Almost zero right. Me, unless there's some really creative gating and compressing everything else going on. But We've put the samples and the process together so you can control this. It will so by very simply just clicking it on. Now you have the snare bleed. Now you have the high app lied. There's no Tom's have this eternal. The symbol bleed on. Not only can you turn all the bleed on, it will, then you can control how loud it is, and that's in every single channel for every single instrument in the mixer. And now I want you to think about what we talked about, the very, very beginning about memory allocation and usage. Because as I'm adding all these things in, keep an eye on what happens down here. You're ultimately adding more sounds into what you had or you could just hit select all. And now everything's in and you can do the same thing here. Let's go to the snare top who has ever heard a snare top microphone with nothing else going on? No high hat, anything. I mean, it's fairly rare. I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm just saying it's not very realistic so we can go in here. We want it less again. We're watching what happens down here as we load stuff that's being used. If it's not being used, it doesn't really matter. But load the kick. Not bad. It changes things. It's literally changed the way the group feels because that's what what happened in a recording thistles. How a great engineer control sound. And again, that's not something you can do in real life. You can't go to the desk and okay, we're gonna It's a process of recording and melding and sampling that are engineers and software designers have put together. That's kind of other worldly and again to think that all of those samples now exist in this studio for every single one of these channels. And some of these channels, like we said, are being used right? So let's. Here's a stereo channel not being used. There's nothing in this channel right now. The ambient far Mike. We can change that. So now it's loading MAWR. That's what you're hearing. The loading right now. Let's listen to what's pull it all the way out, right? So it's not there wasn't there before. Let's listen to how it changes everything. That's pretty incredible, Mawr Incredible is the fact that as you're going to affect these drums with envelopes, your velocity editing, all these other things that's going to be reflected in the bleed, right? That's pretty impressive. All of your changes again. And you wonder why we spend so much time talking about setting up superior to really be optimum and achieve things. You literally had countless options on the very first page before you even got to this page. And now if you know even a little bit about recording right, you can affect and change the sound off your drums so exponentially again, this is before we were even in the Daw. This is still in Superior Drummer. This is we could save a preset right now and again. That's sort of what this master fade panna bleed control are all about here. You don't have the individual bleed controls, but this is the master bleed control. So, for instance, right here, if we solo this again, we just pull the mass. So here's just the snare drum. Bring a little bleeding right now. You hear all the bleeds back in so you can control things on the global level there as well. Anyone want to guess how complicated it is from a software standpoint to achieve that, cause I don't. You know, it's one of those times where you you don't care how you're just glad that it's a cool, very, very musical, very real world function that, once you have it, almost makes recording drums that the old fashioned, real way like disappointing. You're like, Can you dial more bleeding? They really just look at you like what you like. I'm sorry. I just do it when you're done. Just record that we were going to take care of it afterwards. Don't worry, but it's one of those really cool, very musical, very unique features that superior drummers again. It may be common in a number of other programs now, but make no mistake where it started, So the reason it's common is because we couldn't live without it. And this harkens back to our days. You know, everyone that started informed our company tune track in Sweden. They came from a place of song writing. This wasn't like a place of we should get together and start up software company that nobody ever says that. So they got together and looked for reasons why the sample libraries that were existing at the time, and the performance libraries that were existing at the time just weren't really meeting anyone's needs. No one was ever fooled. Used to be able to tell very simply, that's clearly triggered drummer sampled drummer, whether was played or put in after the fact the loss of life and sound qualities, the static nature back in those days. Think about the mid nineties, the late nineties. If you were even alive, then looking at the three of you, I don't know. But I'm just saying if you could pretend, as you like, old people like us like Whoa, whoa, you know, samples, that kind of thing. This is otherworldly. So what else is really interesting about this is as you go through the grooves and change grooves within the same drum set. These things change dramatically because playing changes again. It's a very organic dynamic process toe work In this software, you really can't accommodate what the performer is doing now. When would you want to turn all the bleed off? Well, it depends. I mean, there are some scenarios, for instance, will say you're using unique it Does the bleed really matter if you're triggering live it could. It depends on what you want to do. But ultimately, if you just want that static sound because that's the way the sound guy once that there's a lot of functions we could just go on and turn the bleeds off and not have to worry about it Now. The other cool function that we have let's come over here. That's also not a natural thing you can do. Is the actual channel fade, which is pretty cool. Um, we will demonstrate Channel fade right here with the snare drum again. We're gonna solo it. Okay, so we've got our bleeds on. I'm actually just gonna select everything, put everything because I like it. Ok, not that there's a lot going on. It's cranked all the way up. This fader right here that looks like a pan is the channel fade, and it's going to shorten the decay and the attack on everything coming through this channel. So check it out now. Why is that cool? No, it's not natural. You'd never do it in real life without some sort of outboard processing. And you'd never probably try it. Apply it to everything unattainable. What's cool about that feature. What does that do the minute you sort of change that that decay? Very musical. It's musical in the sense that all the transients air now pushed up to the front of that performance across the entire spectrum. So in a lot of ways it works to some degree. Not exactly, but some degree, like your sound shaping with the envelopes. But what it's doing is much mawr is much less experimental, right? Where with the envelope, you're looking for the sweet spot, depending on what you're trying to do. This is taking everything coming through that channel, and if you go the opposite way, dragging that sustained everything out. So again, massive change to the salmon on. Of course, you could just command quick it back off. So I think again, let's recap. Let's just think about what we did for a second. And again, we want to keep an eye on what we've got going on down here because all that matters to us, right? I mean, we're trying to work efficiently, so we have a professional groove played by Ariel Drummer with some of the best recorded drums in one of the top studios in the world. And now we've said that's not enough. Here you go. Here's some. Here's some Swedish voodoo that we can apply to every channel. Check this out even though it wasn't recorded this way wide open If you want that, you can have that even though, was a routed or bust this way. Even though these mikes, you know, in the room like for this default kit We didn't really record the kick and the snare in the Ambien channels, but we did. We just don't have it on for you. You can turn it on at your leisure and work at the capacity you want to. The reality is, as you do this, you could come down here and you could go into the ambient channels. And you could basically craft a drum sound. That is nothing. But, um, ambient channels would turn the Ambien MENSA select. All right. And then we could solo these two and then you could say, OK, I just want a little kick and maybe a little snare top. Now you have a completely different drum sound, and you haven't You haven't left superior. And again, I think the bigger the bigger idea. Here is these air tools for people that really, really want to make music. These aren't just kind of like, Oh, that's cool. Never use it. But it's a great feature and admittedly, again, with some of the ways we can go in and save presets and do things that are multi functional. We have some of that kind of safety in numbers features with some of our the options in here. But this is a very musical, very riel expression of recording and capturing a drum sound that's unlike anyone else's. I see a microphone raised, and that makes me happy. Yes, so I'm wondering about the bleed mixer when you pull up the mixer. It's kind of like from the perspective of one microphone, correct. We're seeing the bleed for all of your instruments on on just the snare top microphone. Correct. So is there. They're, like, an efficient way to do it the other way around where you're looking kind of instrument specific. Can you mix the bleed on just that instrument and all the mikes? Quickly, quickly. Um, the select, all of the select All functions are pretty much the quickest, but I mean you would need to go in. So unless everything is on rarely very, very rarely are all the bleeds on for every instrument. And in most cases, for instance, where we think, you know, like, for instance, with Tom's, let's go to the first rack. Tom, you go in none of the bleeds on for the rack, Tom. So I mean, ultimately, you generally start from ground zero and then add, as you feel, need as opposed to sort of have to subtract is if you're listening like just to snare the instrument and you want to control like the amount of bleed of the snare in, I don't know the kick drum mic or something is that you have to do with instrument by instrument. You would go in and you would say, because again, for instance, here, nothing. So you'd have to turn this near on, and then you just the volume accordingly based. And it's just that sort of level of crazy control that we want everyone to have. So there is like there. I think your point is there a quick way. Just turn the snare on and everything turn the sneer off and everything. It's track by track, and part of that is because every time you load a different kit, I'll show you what I mean. So as we go back into our combined presets and you the gated kit, you'll notice that it's got the pitch. The bleed usage varies in every kid as well. So to have a universal control would be defeated the minute you opened any other kid. Because everything has got its own preset sort of. This is how we got it to sound, the way we gotta sound bleed. Does that answer? Yeah, okay. Yes, sir. Or could you set it up? Uh, control the bleed control through a bus? Could you set it up that way? Could you route just the bleed to a bus or like, that snare channel Kind of going off of what he was saying, Um, and here's what you would need to do. And I don't mean to cut you off hours. I just did it anyway, So if you wanted to do that so you would route this. So let's say bus one and two, okay. And what's really cool is you can pull the direct signal out just about the bleed in the bus control. Yeah, So when I said, I'll show you a way to do it when I really meant was Yeah, Here's how you do it. So thes e. These could be sent together, linked together or independent of one another. You consent just the direct signal or just the bleed to a bus makes rhyming Makes routing really interesting. Like you said you could then send. You could have five buses of just bleed and compress. I mean, ultimately. And now think about I know that this makes total sense when you, when you're dealing with electronic dry mean when you're dealing with real drums. But now think about any affected drums or specialty drums and percussion or anything else that's kind of going on that you and a broadening through superior drummer. The bleed function is on, and I don't think I'm over estimates a whole new. It's a whole additional world of pure audio, just magistrate. It's like, wow, anyone that really loves to play with sound. By the time you're done tweaking everything on the first page and you get to the mixture, it's like it didn't even matter. Now you have a whole other set of pallets and tools and things that you can work with to make sounds again before you even get to your dog. Or however you're gonna do your final processing to have another question. Thanks. He's holding a Michael like this. He's got another question. I like a question, sir, from the topic of questions. Yes, it's This is from our online audience is really funny that engineers have spent years trying to minimize bleed. And now software adds it back. Um, when you load up a default kit, is the bleed set up to be as it was in the studio, or is it modified after the recording to optimize the sound? So you talked about all of this, Mike. Okay, so in every expansion, that's a great question that never expansion library. Not that they're all not great questions. Daddy loves you all. I'm just saying that was a great question. Um, when you come into any one of our libraries, you have the default kit, which is always the default. You have the full kit. You have a number of different sort of settings, and in one of the things that we generally tend to have like, for instance, an easy drummer. The kits will always be called original mix. And what that is, as the drums is, they were sent out the original mix. I mean, we haven't really done anything. It's the same thing here. The default kit will always be optimized because it's the default and that's cool you're going. But when you do the full kit, so this will be set up the way we recorded there. You see all the drums come into play. It's almost, you know, two gigs. So this would be in the basic kit or the full kit in an STX. This would be the way that they tracked everything right? So if you think about any type of manufacturing and I don't mean software, but just recording, you're always probably going to start with everything at once and then strip things a way to get different sounds. So this would be the drum set in its purest form, the way it was recorded with the bleeds and everything else to the best. You know, you see the bleeds on on so many channels with this little bleed light here, the way that the engineers had it. You know what? The snare mic, this that is the closest to the original. Hey, this is how it came straight off the desk. So when you deviate from that, you start to take things into your own hands, which is great. But yes, every expansion product we have has sort of that this is what it sounded like when we were there, and we tracked it kind of feature the original where the full, you know, the basic drum kit and then everything else is basically us saying, OK, that's the full kit. The basic kit is really gonna take things down. Different amalgamation of the drums or put together on the bleeds will definitely be affected by that. Anything else? Nobody else has any other bleed related. How cool is the bleeding? I mean that that function in that feature puts a period drummer in sort of a different category as far as what you can do with it. And again, we've been talking about this all day, but now I think everyone delight goes on the minute you see that you think this is why memories is just so important. This is why you're layer limits are so important because all of that's affected. All of the cool stuff you can do is affected by how you've set the software up to run. And that's the beauty of the software. A lot of people want to get in and just go again. To a lot of people, the easy drummer mixture is more preferable because it's already like you said, Done for you everything. Maybe there's one kick channel where all three kick Mike's air kind of blended to one and compressed, and it's It's radio ready and you just go. There's people need that. There's definitely people who love that. But engineers and folks that generate intellect to twiddle and have options available. I mean, can you imagine someone just discovering bleed right now is we're talking for the first time, like I was wondering what that was. That's a whole day of your life. You're gonna lose now, just turning the bleed of everything on on every channel, on and off. And what's really cool is it really starts to come into play again as you start to see some of the experimental thing. So, for instance, were playing this lets you all these big difference when you turn off the Ambien Mike's, which in and of itself is awesome. But there's still one Mike that this isn't utilizing because it's like a special effects Mike and a lot of our STX libraries have this where the engineer or the producers like Hey, let's do something crazy. You know, I've seen them put condenser mikes in, you know, big, like the water cooler water type. Just put that out and put it in the corner. Microphones built in the walls, crazy over compressed, trashy Mike's, you know, just something unique. And then it's in the mixer. It may not necessarily be playing live, and in this instance it's the Ambien bullet Mike. So we don't have anything going through that right now, So if we solo that pull it up, we can go ahead and see. Let's pull the kick through. You can tell that it's it's got kind of that crunchy, distorted, big difference, right? I mean, sonically and again, we watch our memory come up. But this would be where we'd say, OK, that's a little crunchy. Maybe I pull the fade back a little bit so the transients aren't as smashing, right? We got some of that dirt out of there. And maybe that ad you can hear you mute it, you hear a big time. Your snare drum has a whole new vibe. You haven't changed drums. You haven't done that. You basically just added a channel to the mixer and you have a new instrument. And then again, if this was a fuller group or bigger song and we had all these other components where we had crashed symbols, everything else. And we do have a crash symbol, so we'll turn all the crash move on just so we know which one it is. You hear the crash in the background now again, we could and then as if that's not enough, take that out of phase. Everything's gonna follow with it accordingly and again. Then we could pull this stuff down. You have a completely different sound than you started with just by pushing a couple of buttons. Now, earlier, we had a question about phase accuracy and how that all works. And this is why I'm I sort of went into my little disclaimer about listen, phases a crazy and majestic beast that again can't be tamed just by saying, You need to be in phase all the time. Ah, lot of the sound on a lot of the lump of these recordings come from decisions that engineers and producers make to allow things to be out of phase to a degree for the overall greater good of the song. That's not always the case, but that's just audio 101 you can't mitigate with any sort of accuracy that everything will always be 100% cohesively and phase. And that's why we give you face tools so you can kind of invert the phase. You could see what's going on. You can try the actual fade to see if the decay of the overall channel will adjust that or change that. As we talk about mapping and adding drums, it becomes even more important that your ears air sort of listening to what's going on because this is again, this is a starting point. This is just where you begin with this journey. We haven't even done any of the rules super hyper duper cool stuff that we're gonna do in the morning, and then when we route it out again, the options here again. You have a drum group that you can play here. That group has a recorded performance. We all agree on that. So you start with that groove. You have this drum set, you can tweak this. Trump said any way you want to, you can then go in and affect these drums. The physical composition basically of the way the drum sound works with itself or by itself. You can then adjust the actual tuning pitch decay of the drum. You can go in and affect the performance to the point where the actual information of software is being fed is more consistent with what a human being would do. You can then come in and change every single little minute detail off the performance without affecting the audio whatsoever. Again, you can tell the drummer less high hat without having to pull the high at fader down. Then you can take that and make sure that all the sound you want to hear have enough memory and power behind them so that you're getting an amazing performance. Come over here. Ah, just some master controls before you even get to the mixture and go crazy. And then make sure your computer has enough resource is to do this whole thing over and over and over again. And that's just where you start. It's mind bottling, as they would say, and then you go to the mixer and now this is a whole other day of your life. Were like, Well, whom. Why don't I try taking all these drums and going to this bus and putting this effect chain on it? Or what if I take just three of those four drums in the bleed from the fourth drum and just effect and you go until you go and then you can take every single channel and right here on output, right Right here you've got everything's coming out one and two if you or you could multi channel out, and everything will automatically line up on a different track so you can route this out to your dog from inside, you know, into its own channel. And then once it comes into the channel strip of your daughter, you have a whole new game structure to deal with. Ah, whole new if you've got, like, voltage controlled fate. I mean, you have a whole other world that you're starting all over again with an already amazing sound. It's pretty powerful stuff. As far as drum production goes, I'm not really aware of anything else that does this to this level. This way. With this sort of flexibility, I may be wrong. Sometimes I am. I don't think I am in this particular instance. Questions, concerns. Nobody has anything floor with their mouth open. Pretty much. Sebastian from Paris says I'm Sebastian from Paris in Paris, France. Thank you so much for this very interesting masterclass. Thank you so much to tune track for this excellent product that I use all the days. Well, you're that's about as French is. I get anything else. After that, I start to sound like popular pew from the loony tunes becoming at all. So let's just make sure that we're still good to go. We've got some more mixer information because again, I think it bears repeating as you change presets. And as you change libraries, you're going to have different options in the mixer and tomorrow. What we're going to be learning about the mixer in relation to drum mapping and adding extra ums is how toe ad channels to the mixer that are going to accommodate new sounds and how to work with those sounds in the mixer. So to me today, the most important component of this is to make sure that the basics of the mixer are understood. So again, you've got your presets. You've got your routing. You've got your bleed. You have your fate control, which is kind of this really unique tool. You have your panning, basic stuff you have in a mixture, your multi output routing. We actually only have outputs one and two, so we want to make sure that everything's there. You also have a stereo reverse. A lot of people aren't even aware that, depending on the engineer or the recording as you're listening to drums in a recording, there's two ways you can hear the drums, um, the default way or the way that I'm the most comfortable. Notice how it since I'm comfortable with it. I call it default, because why wouldn't it be the best? But would be from the drummers perspective, where if he's a right handed drummer, your high hat would be panned this way and the drums in the toms would cascade or follow accordingly. But you could also do this switch here in stereo. Reverse the field. Where will be like you were watching the drummer live, So the high hat would be over there and everything would sort of come this way again. There is no right or wrong. It's just a matter of what you prefer. Andi, if you're smart, you prefer my way because it should be the default way, which I think is the underlying tone here is that that's the best way the drummer waits. It's best to hear the drums the way the drummer, the right hander drummer because left hand drummers the whole thing we got to do with them. But I mean, seriously, so you have that option is what with the flick of a switch.