Yeah, you’ll probably have some bleed no matter what. But you can try to tame it so the bleed isn’t particularly noticeable. It’ll also be dependent on the actual parts being played. If the horn & piano parts are rhythmically different it will be much easier to separate them.
Good video
When I first began recording, rooms were large, with gobos everywhere.
The ambience, at least for basic tracks, either worked or it didn’t.
If it didn’t, then you had to re-think your approach, or just live with it.
Since multi track recorders were becoming more available, (late 60s,early 70s) separation became a desirable feature, so we could drive ourselves nuts soloing channels and using the new gates/expanders which were emerging to fill that desire.
Personally, I realized that gobos NEVER eliminated the bleed, they only soaked up/deflected the good frequencies of the offending instrument,
leaving me with low-fi low frequency mud leakage instead.
Since then, I’ve never used gates or gobos, but I do put vulnerable parts into separate rooms, now available through the magic of headphones, or else I overdub the part instead.
BTW, putting the drums into the kitchen is a wonderful solution to that problem, and if your kitchen is well stocked,it can be quite an attraction for drummers!
I’ve done a lot of live gig recording Funk / Jazz, Brass stuff. on a fairly small stage. When editing the recording, I would Usaly just manualy mute sections each instrument was not playing and lightly eq out frequences below and above the natural range of the instrument.
I would carefuly gate the kick and snare, but leave over heads un tuched, other that time aliging the whole kit to the snare, and eqing out the low end, from 600-800 ish.
Thats about all you can do with out adding more artifacts.
I would get good enought results. The limitation of this approach is however if your wanting to do pitch correction / time correction. In which case the only way to go is to multrack miced instruments one at a time. Obvuisouly anything that can be DI’D and monitoed via headphone fold back can be multitracked with out issue.
Ben
Thank you for your contribution. Regarding drum-allignment; some have suggested using the overheads as the prime source for allignment, and phase-shifted all the drums accordingly to the overheads. Is that something anyone else would recommend? Thank you.
Thank you for sharing. I’ve had similar experience with some gates. They can muddy up and distort the signal some, even though their almost bypassed. Other then the kick, snare and perhaps the toms; when would it be crucial to use a gate in a studio-session?