Kick Drum mic Bleed

[raycarroll03]

Our church has bought an Roland electric drum kit. How do I stop the kick drum sound from being picked up by vocal mics or if I can not how is the best way to control. The wireless mics are Sennheiser xsw 2 835. Any help would be appreciated.

Ray

[almabes]

Proper mic placement, proper gain structure, proper EQ. Not routing kick into wedges. High pass the mics

[Dilettant]

Don’t think this is a Mixing desk feature (besides you may have messed up the routing of the drum he

If possible don’t route the base drum to vocal’s monitor wedges. If vocals really need that, in-ear monitoring would be an option.

Choose not too responsive vocal mics with good directivity patterns for the use case. Place and direct them so they catch up vocals, not speakers (monitor, front line speakers, back line speakers, whatever) playing back drum signals. beware of spherical capsules on small headset mics – maybe some cardioid pattern is a better choice here. In Studios, sometimes some mobile plexi glass plates can help with such things, live this maybe optical disturbing.
Beware of reflections of the kick sound on hard walls or windows Sometimes you just need to change some Speaker direction a little or plase some damping thing a little before a reflecting Wall or Window glass (_before_, not _on_ the reflecting plane – you cannot damp anything there).

lookout for decroupling of structure-transmitted noise. Place Vocal Mic Stands, foot machine and drum speakers on rubber mats or bass decouplers or fly that speakers so they don’t kick the floor directly. Massive stone or concrete floor helps here, too..

Use a steep high pass filter on vocals to lower grip sonic and subsonic parts from the bass drum and eq your vocals poperly. Maybe a little fast ducking of the drum by the vocals can help but thats difficile to adjust. and may sound “pumpy”.

And finally: IMHO you will almost _never_ get perfectly decoupled mic tracks when recording/picking up live on stage. That is nearly impossible but doesn’t really matter anyway, just mix your tracks and use ears most of the time you can get a reasonable sound anyway. All that Mictracks can bring in is part of the music/show anyway, so there is nothing wrong using it. Just watch out for big damage like feedback and get all the music to all the listeners (but not too loud, that is another old mistake giving problems over problems).

[Mike C]

What are you sending to the sound system from the drum controller, just a L R mix or individual trigger outputs, or sub mixes from the drum controller?

How loud are the stage monitors or do you use in ear monitors?

How close are the signers to the microphones?

What kind of mics are they?

If there singing 12 inches from the mic and your turning up the mic gain just to
hear the vocals your also turning up all the mic bleed into the mic.
Remember the loudest sound at the mic is what it is going to pick up, there is no magic
knob on any mixer to change that.

[Author]

Posts