Taming Overbearing Cymbals

Dealing with harsh and heavy cymbals while tracking -- and afterwards - with mic placement, EQ, de-essers and other techniques

By Phil O'Keefe

While we all know that it's best to get the sound right from the source, there are times when, for whatever reason, you're faced with mixing a song with less than stellar sounding drum tracks. These will often have cymbals that are excessively loud or overly bright in comparison to the rest of the track.

The potential causes of this can vary. Cymbals can sometimes be overly bright and harsh sounding due to the conditions in smaller, acoustically under-treated rooms. This can be further complicated by lower quality microphones, preamps and converters, or less than optimal use of those tools. Drummers themselves are often a big source of the problem; being used to having to work to project their cymbals in rehearsal rooms and live venues with less than ideal PA systems and drum miking, many are accustomed to playing the brass rather hard. Unless you ask them to (nicely, and preferably in advance of the session so they can practice doing it), they're going to do the same thing in the studio that they do live. If you find yourself in a situation where you have less than ideal drum recordings, your best option is to go back, fix the problem and then re-track the drums, but if that option isn't available to you, you'll need to make the best out of what you have.

DE-ESSER VS EQ

Applying a fixed EQ -- often with a basic low-pass or high frequency shelving filter (Figure 1) to the cymbal and overhead tracks to try to attenuate the bright and overbearing cymbals is sometimes the only solution, but it can leave the rest of the drum kit sounding lifeless and dull. Instead, a de-esser plugin can often be put to good use here. De-essers, as their name suggests, are normally used on vocals, and are designed to reduce the apparent volume of sibilant sounds from consonants such as the letters s, f, v and t. These "hissy" sounds can often be louder than the main pitched parts of the vocal, and when they are, they sound rather annoying and distracting. As with our drum cymbal issue, these strident high frequency sounds occur irregularly throughout the track, and the de-esser's job is to reduce their volume and impact while leaving the rest of the vocal tonality as unchanged as possible. Since the drums have similar issues, a de-esser can sometimes be used effectively on them too.

Figure 1: The Eventide UltraChannel with a high shelf EQ being used to roll off the highs. The section highlighted in red is the plugin's well-featured dynamics processor; shown configured as a de-esser

SETTING THE DE-ESSER

Different de-essers will have different controls, from the comprehensive to the simplified, so giving you specific settings for every de-esser isn't going to be possible. Most will have some sort of range or threshold control that determines how loud the high frequency peak has to be before the de-esser kicks in. The idea here is to set it so that only the loud cymbal hits trigger de-essing, but not so low that other things, like snare and kick drums trigger it by themselves. Due to the masking and "they'll bleed into every mic on the kit" characteristics of the loud cymbals, those hits are already being washed out and occluded by the cymbals, so reducing their brightness and impact can help those other drums to cut through more audibly, especially if the skins were also recorded to individual tracks.

De-essing plugins use frequency dependent compression. Only sonic information above a user-set frequency will be attenuated by the compression. On some plugins, this is called lowpass or "high frequency only" mode. Some de-essers allow you to have the compression triggered by the high frequencies that exceed the threshold but with gain reduction across the full audio bandwidth instead, and while you may find this useful occasionally, it generally works best on drums when you have the de-esser filter out only the highs. One thing I like about the standard Digirack De-esser plugin (Figure 2) and the freeware (Mac / PC) Spitfish de-esser (Figure 3) from www.digitalfishphones.com is that they allow you to "listen" to only the frequencies that the plugin is filtering out. By soloing the cymbals, hitting the Listen button and sweeping the frequency control, you can get a good idea of what the plugin is filtering out of the loud hits that trigger its compression. For drum cymbals, in many cases, I'll set the frequency somewhere between 5kHz and 10kHz; the lower in that range you set it, the more effective it will be at taming the cymbals, but at the cost of more audible coloration on the rest of the drum kit.

Figure 2: The Digirack de-esser plugin that comes bundled with Pro Tools has a simplified control set, but can still be quite effective. Note that it is running in "HF Only" mode, so that only the highs are attenuated when it is triggered

Figure 3: The Spitfish de-esser is an excellent plugin that is available for Mac and PC, and best of all, it's free

DON'T FORGET THE AUTOMATION

Sometimes automating the threshold level of your de-esser by lowering it  for louder hits and raising it on less aggressive hits can help you  keep the level and sound of the cymbals more even and consistent. In addition to basic de-essing and automating the plugin's threshold, frequency and sensitivity to deal with the varying needs throughout the course of the song, some volume automation on particularly loud cymbal hits will help to reduce the impact of those hits that are just too much for the de-esser to deal with alone. (Figure 4) I suggest doing the automation by riding a physical fader on a control surface whenever possible. It can help to do the song in sections - intro, verse, chorus, etc. - that way, you can memorize and concentrate on where the issues are for that section so you can manually compensate for them with corresponding adjustments of the fader while writing volume automation. If a automation pass doesn't work, you can always go back and try again, or just go back before the part where you messed up and continue writing automation from there. Using the mouse to draw in the automation is fine too, but a control surface will allow you to mix faster and with better "feel", and you can always go back and use the mouse to fine-tune things as needed.

Figure 4: Using volume automation to reduce the impact of the heaviest hits is often also needed

SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR NEXT TIME…

Once you've had to try to deal with taming overly enthusiastic cymbal playing on a drum recording a few times, you'll really start to appreciate the benefits of getting them right in tracking. Sometimes the material is so bad that retracing is really the only viable option - there's no salvaging some recordings! If you do decide to re-track, you'll end up with similar sounding results unless you make some changes to your approach and setup. Here are some suggestions you can try when you retrack that will help reduce or eliminate the issue at the source so that you won't have to try to fix it later in the mix.

• Ask the drummer to ease up on the cymbals. Give some attention to this in your pre-production meetings and rehearsals. Be careful that it doesn't affect their groove or "feel."

• Try a different drummer. Some drummers have a knack for mixing the various elements of the kit as they play, which makes the engineer's job much easier. If they also have good time, send me their phone number please - I can always use great session drummers!

• Move the kit to a different part of the room, or a different room entirely. A better sounding room will make a big improvement in the overall sound of your drum tracks, and with laptops and modern multichannel interfaces, there's no reason why you can't take the tracking tools to a better room and record the drums there.

• Try a different pair of overhead mikes. That pair of condensers that works great for bringing out the highs of your dark-sounding acoustic guitar with the two year old dead strings on it might not be the ideal first choice for use on drum overheads, particularly if the drummer is overly enthusiastic with the cymbals or they're on the bright side. Ribbon microphones can often even out the harsh high frequencies while still giving you excellent transient response, and in many cases they make excellent drum overhead microphones.

• Try different overhead mic placements. Placing the overhead mikes directly above the cymbals and aimed down at them often accentuates the brass in the overheads at the expense of the rest of the kit. Instead, try a XY or Blumlein stereo pair placed directly behind and slightly above the drummer's head and facing forward and slightly down towards the center of the kit. This can give you a "as the drummer hears it" perspective of the kit, and will usually de-emphasize the cymbals somewhat, resulting in a more evenly balanced recording of the entire kit.

• Try darker cymbals and cymbals with faster decay. Darker cymbals can help reduce the harsh high frequencies, and faster decaying cymbals help reduce the overall mix clutter.

• Keep some large sized cymbal felts on hand in the studio. Larger cymbal felts can have a damping effect on the cymbal that will darken the sound and shorten the sustain. Tightening down the wing nut can further increase the damping effect of large felt pads, but too much tightening can risk cracking the cymbal, so proceed with caution here.

• Raise the height of the cymbals a few inches above where they normally sit. This helps because it changes the impact angle of the drummer's sticks and can help to remind the drummer to go easier on the brass... but tread lightly here - drummers are like everyone else and they won't appreciate you going in and changing their setups without asking, but if you talk to them about it nicely and explain the issue, they might be willing to give it a try. This technique can be particularly helpful for overly loud hi hats, as it can help reduce the amount of bleed from them into the snare mic.

• Play the track back to the band and drummer. Sometimes just letting them hear the problem is enough to encourage them to make an effort to correct it.

STILL FIGHTING WITH IT?

Still struggling with that mix and the aggressive cymbals? If you're using a drum bus compressor, try running only the actual "drum" tracks into it and not the cymbal tracks. Depending on how you have the bus compressor set, this will often prevent the compressor from further accentuating the cymbals.

Try a tape sim plugin - these can often soften transients and smooth out the high frequencies.

Are you still fighting with it…? Really dude, you should consider re-tracking those drums. You'll save yourself time in the long run AND have better sounding results than you'll ever get from trying to "fix it" when it's that bad. Just sayin'!

Phil O'Keefe is a multi-instrumentalist, recording engineer / producer and the Senior Editor of Harmony Central. He has engineered, produced and performed on countless recording sessions in a diverse range of styles, with artists such as Alien Ant Farm, Jules Day, Voodoo Glow Skulls, John McGill, Michael Knott and Alexa's Wish. He is a former featured monthly columnist for EQ magazine, and his articles and product reviews have also appeared in Keyboard, Electronic Musician and Guitar Player magazines.