In this free video extract from pureMix Jacquire King demonstrates how and why in this particular mix he chooses to leave ringing tom mics bleeding rather than gate them.

Audio engineers are usually control freaks and as a result it’s not surprising that bleed between mics is usually percieved as being a bad thing. I wish I could remebr who it was who said this but a quote I have always thought very worth remembering is that “the music is in the rough edges” and it is only too easy to lose something important in our efforts to find perfection.

An excellent example is discussed in this free excerpt from “Start to Finish: Jacquire King - Episode 19 Mixing Part 1” where Jacquire explains how by removing the contribution of the close mics on the toms affects the tone of the kick drum in a negative way.

Why Leave The Tom Bleed?

Some drums have a more definite pitch to their tuning than others. Snare drums a principally noise-based. the rattle of the snares lacks a definite pitch. At the other end of the spectrum orchestral Timpani are tuned to specific pitches and are played as pitched instruments. Of the kit pieces in a typical drumset the toms are the most pitched element and the contribution of sympathetic resonance (i..e. ringing) of a tom in response to a kick drum can be significant, adding a long overtone to the kick.

Whether or not this sympathetic resonance is a good or a bad thing depends on the how well the pitch of the tom fits with the timbre of the kick and the key of the song. This is one of the reasons that tuning the toms to the key of the song can be a good idea, particularly as there is no easy way to change it after the performance has been recorded.

To hear how Jacquire treated the tom spill in this example head over to the PureMix Blog where you can hear audio examples in context.

See how Jacquire King:

• Dials in the Distressor on the bass guitar to control the peaks on the bass guitar

• Shapes the sound going into the Distressor

• Adds a short delay to the bass to spread the image out, giving a tiled room effect

• Adds his drum bus eq with a Neve 1081

• Builds a parallel compression drum bus with a Distressor set to Nuke

• Blends in the Kick Sample

• Auditions an API 550A and SSL E Channel Strip for eq on the snare drum

• Listens to the EQ difference between the SSL E series and G series on snare, then explains his preference

• Adds additional parallel compression paths including a Drum Crush bus and Kick/Snare parallel

• Adjusts tom ringing to be a part of the overall tone of the kit

How Do I Watch Jacquire King Reviewing The Programming

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