Hi guys
I’m a live sound engineer just starting out using Audacity and editing WAV’s from live recordings.
In situations where the recording was … ahem … less than optomal, and “embracing the spill” from other instruments is just a bit excessive…
… I’m trying to tidy up the toms from the drum kit. All the kit (and everything else on stage unfortunately) has been picked up the drum kit overheads … too hard to do anything with…
… however, the Rack Toms and Floor Tom mics especially are perfectly suited to attempting to remove the “rubbish” they picked up. It’s mostly the electric bass and the lower frequencies of the vocals creating a wash of mud picked up by the microphone, but using a HPF to get rid of them would also rob all the tone out of the drums. Although though the toms are used only a few times during each song, the “mud” the microphone also captured remains for the whole song.
I tried out the Noise Gate plugin with some extreme settings and it did a surprisingly good job in leaving only the tom sounds behind. HOWEVER…
… the 10ms attack time is way too long and misses the initial drum attack
… the resultant 10ms release time (why are they linked? Sigh) clips off almost all of the ring from the drum.
For the attack, I know - because of sampling and processing - 10ms is probably the best I can get with this plugin.
Is it possible to somehow (probably with something else, not this plugin)
… duplicate the floor tom track
… offset the duplicate track by 10ms so it’s drum hits are 10ms before the original
… use the “early” duplicate track to then trigger the noise gate over the original, overcoming the 10ms minimim attack time?
I admit this would only solve the problem with the attack time, the far-too-short release time of 10ms still remains (perhaps if the offset idea works, use 100ms and set the Noise Gate combined attack/release time to that?)
Thoughts?
Thanks
Barry