The term bleed is used to describe a certain type of sound we need to listen for when tracking and mixing live multitrack drums. Also known as spill, bleed is sound being captured by microphones that are capturing something else entirely. For example, a typical sound of bleed is part of the sound of a kick drum entering a microphone pointing at a snare drum.

There are two general schools of thought when it comes to addressing bleed. Many engineers embrace it as the combination of bleed and direct sound across all the channels of a live multi microphone recording add up to a desired balance. Others prefer to strip out bleed which can focus sound, especially on drum kit pieces.

In this free video tutorial you will learn how to address spill in a live multitrack drum mix. This demonstration focuses on the snare drum channel which needed the bleed reduced in order to apply other processing which, if the bleed was still present, would have effected the overall tonality of the bigger picture of the drums.

In this free video tutorial we show you how to address bleed in Studio One using Sonnox Drum Gate.

Read our review to learn more about Sonnox Drum Gate: