FXpansion BFD Premium Acoustic Drum Module Mixing with BFD - Manual (Page 15)

15
Mixing with BFD www.fxpansion.com
To put it simply, bleed is spill between the direct mic channels. When you mic up a drumkit
with close mics for each drum/hat/cymbal, each mic will always pick up some sound from
the other drums. This is obviously not a concern on mics like overheads/rooms/PZMs, as
these are designed to pick up the sound of the whole kit anyway.
The bleed in BFD is limited to the kick in, kick out, snare top, snare bottom and multi mic
channels, the multi channel being the direct channel for everything but kicks and snares.
Please note that we decided not to implement bleed in the tom and cymbal mic channels,
as it’s ultimately just not that useful, and is inconvenient more often than not.
• Controlling bleed in BFD
The bleed level controls (kick, snare and multi) allow you to set the global levels for each
type of bleed channel.
Individual bleed channels for each Kit-Piece are shown in red on the output matrix, and
each bleed channel, like any other mic channel, can be routed to any available output, or
muted completely.
There is also a handy toggle switch in multi-output versions of BFD which routes the
bleed channels for each Kit-Piece to its primary direct channel output. Processing each
channel’s bleed along with its main mic channel can have a nice effect, and can be useful
if you want to keep some of the flavour of the bleed, while allowing you to process and
mix each part of the kit totally discretely.
If you get rid of bleed altogether the drums will sound cleaner, although you may miss the
organic character that bleed offers. Bleed can sometimes help the different elements of a
drum mix glue together nicely. On the other hand, you should get rid of bleed (or route it
to the primary direct mic channel) if you want to totally separate each part of the kit into
its own channel for further processing.
With a drumkit, there is a lot of sympathetic resonance between the drums anyway,
such as the snare wire rattling when the kick is played, although some kicks in BFD are
provided with and without a snare present. Keeping these types of sounds adds to the
realism of BFD, and similarly, don’t necessarily be too eager to separate each kit-piece
to its own discrete channel. Since bleed is an unavoidable real-world phenomenon, it’s
always the case on most real drum productions that, for instance, bleed from the kick
goes through the snare channel’s processing, and vice versa.
3:4. Panning
Don’t be afraid to use mono when it comes to the ambient channels or panning the
directs - it can help the mix to sound bigger. It’s quite common to use a mono room signal
with heavy compression for example (make it mono by using the Width control on the
Room bus). Although the directs are panned by default in BFD to reflect the layout of the
kit, it can be a good idea to put the kick, snare and hat in the centre of the stereo field
- this can give the drums more weight, presence and impact.