To Bleed or Not To Bleed in Live Drum Recording is the Question

I am recording live kit with hats, top and bottom snare, toms, overhead and room mic.  What is the more professional sound, taking time to clean up all the bleed from other tracks and have just the hits or leave the bleed and gate the mics best you can?  I am learning towards cleaning up the bleed because I am playing drums in a bedroom so I don't have much space for the sound to travel so I have a lot of bleed.

Eric covered most of what I probably would have said... Also sort of depends on the style of music you're recording... Really fast precision prog-rock / metal would probably require more gating / cleaning, than say... a Tom Petty record or something... But half the fun of recording drums (if you actually consider that to be FUN), IS the experimentation really.  Just mess around with stuff, and see what works, but like Eric said, the more mics you have, MAKE SURE YOU DON'T IGNORE PHASE ISSUES. 
 
But I'm curious, just because I'm a drum recording / microphone geek, what exactly are the mics you're using for everything?  I don't generally get a chance to talk microphones with people on "digital recording" forums these days, so my ears always perk up when I hear someone say they're actually miking things these days.  (I mic EVERYTHING I possibly can...)  SO YEAH!!!  MICROPHONES!  WOOOOOOO!!!  *high five*  Sometimes I even mic the studio monitors, just to experiment with random tones & colors. 
 
Microphones...
 
*sigh*
 
So dreamy...

I agree with that to a certain extent (like I said, for Tom Petty style music, as an example)... "Natural sounding music"... But sometimes, with crazy fast prog rock drummers and stuff, that bleed can get muddy REAL quick, and you won't be able to hear the tom hits, if you have 8 tom mics, 2 snare mics, hi-hat, ride, 3 kick mics, 7 room mics, etc... (just randomly throwing numbers out at this point)...
 
But to a certain extent, (for THAT kind of music), that's sort of what the room mics & overheads are for... You'll still hear that "bleed" through the room mics and stuff... But if you're individually miking every piece of the kit (sometimes including 2 mics on each tom, top & bottom, etc...)  Then bleed can quickly become that friend at the party that you'd rather not have to deal with, because they drink too heavily or something...
 
But yeah, other times, it's nice to just have a kick mic, snare mic, and a room-mic, and go all natural or whatever... It REALLY depends on the style of music you're mixing. 

Having only one project at a time is I think the way to do it.  However I think there is some strange happening with the Step Seq....See this post.
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Question-about-Drum-MapStep-Sequencer-Annomilies-m2901667.aspx
 
cheers

I hate bleed and I mic hi-hats, but that's just me.  I like isolation but it depends on the style you are going for.

I agree with a lot of what is said here, but as to "what is the more professional sound?", there's really no right way.  Just to add my own 2cents to the mix (no pun intended), is to record for the song, not for the kit.  If I'm tracking a jazz song, I'm probably going to be wide open, if I'm doing pop or rock, I'll do more gating and isolation.  But I will say that to me a drum kit is not a collection of individual instruments, I view it as one collective instrument.  Too much of one thing is usually not a good.  A super blended kit could sound muddy and without character and attack, where a super isolated kit could sound disjointed, unnatural and worse than MIDI drums.
 
Recording acoustic drums is a Pandora's box of choices, what type of kit are you using (maple, birch, other)? What head choice? Why cymbal choices? What mics are you using? What mic placement are you using, etc., etc., etc.  However nothing to me sound better on a session than a live acoustic set, with a human being playing it.  Then again one of the worst sounding things is a live acoustic set, with a human being playing....badly. :)
 
One more tip, that I got from watching a Thomas Lang video in his home studio.  He always records with something like 24 mics all the time, but he does not use all of those mics in the final mix.  IOW he captures everything and has every thing already setup and placed, and ready to go, but when he mixes the song, he choses the tracks that best fit that song, be it 4, 12 or all of them.  I currently only record on 8 channels but I'm going to be moving to this method, because rather than after listening to play back and deciding that my kick mic needs to be closer to the batter head, using 3 or 4 mics on the kick in different places, I can just select which one, or mix of ones that sound best and not have to re-do anything.
 
Experiment blended and isolated, and somewhere inbetween, and save everything you do to a track template so it can be easily recalled.
 
Cheers!

Etmos
Eric covered most of what I probably would have said... Also sort of depends on the style of music you're recording... Really fast precision prog-rock / metal would probably require more gating / cleaning, than say... a Tom Petty record or something... But half the fun of recording drums (if you actually consider that to be FUN), IS the experimentation really.  Just mess around with stuff, and see what works, but like Eric said, the more mics you have, MAKE SURE YOU DON'T IGNORE PHASE ISSUES. 
 
But I'm curious, just because I'm a drum recording / microphone geek, what exactly are the mics you're using for everything?  I don't generally get a chance to talk microphones with people on "digital recording" forums these days, so my ears always perk up when I hear someone say they're actually miking things these days.  (I mic EVERYTHING I possibly can...)  SO YEAH!!!  MICROPHONES!  WOOOOOOO!!!  *high five*  Sometimes I even mic the studio monitors, just to experiment with random tones & colors. 
 
Microphones...
 I am using a mixture, Audix D2 high tom, D4 Low Tom, D6 kick, Snare top Audix I5, snare bottom sm57, one overhead Rode NT1, Room mic XL990.  I have 2 NT5 on order for overheads
*sigh*
 
So dreamy...

BMOG
The style of music I am recording is smooth Jazz R&B
 

Yeah, for "smooth Jazz" I would probably use less mics, and allow more bleed through the mics you DO end up using.  For R&B, I guess that (to me) is sort of a wide genre in itself.  If you're doing stuff more along the lines of Usher, or "Dance / R&B / Pop" type stuff, then I would probably use a few additional mics, minimize bleed, and then maybe go nuts with effects (just to experiment with different sounds and stuff).  But if by R&B you mean "R&B more along the lines of a smooth jazz recording" then I would stick with the less mics, and more bleed. 
 
But really, experimentation is where it's at with drum recordings.  I just admire anyone that chooses to mic stuff instead of instantly going to samples these days.  I started with drum machines & samples for everything, because I couldn't afford decent drum mics (or a drum kit, etc...)  But now that I have a full kit, and crazy mics to choose from, and all of that stuff, I would have a hard time going back to using samples, they just sound unnatural to me (even "professional recorded ones" like BFD & Slate, etc...)  I still use those sometimes to experiment with layers, but for the most part, miking a live kit, and practicing until it's perfect (in your idea of perfection), that's where it's at man!

There's a great article in this month's SOS about it. Or rather, an in-depth answer to someone asking the same question.

Hi Jeebus. Finally a familiar face!

I am a true musician and I want to keep real music alive, I have been contracted out to produce an album that will have styles of music in from Boney James, Brian Culbertson to Will Downing feature a bass as the lead.  I think it is to easy now of days for none musicians to make music from loops and synth instruments. However I have stumbled on to addictive drums and I must say the demo's I have heard some really impressive.  But I to want to be able learn and figure out what will be the best setup for me in this small room.