Jimbo: in my experience, it's been rare that I use overheads to control the crack in my snare drum. I DO use them to enhance the rest of the kit, but when I want more crack in the snare, I put more crack on the snare track exclusively. If you want, I can pm you a little 8 minute video that I did for another site showing some of the things I do to get more crack in situations like this? Let me know and I'll send a pm your way.

-Danny

Jimbo,
 
I do the same thing you are describing, reduce the amount of snare bleed in the OH channel.   I find many of the Superior Presets have the snare bleed way too hot in the OH channel.   Took awhile for me to figure out why I wasn't getting the right snare sound after tweaking the snare channel in my Sonar drum template, then realized the snare was blaring through the OH channel in some cases louder than the cymbals.
 
Regards

Probalby one of the biggest differences in drum sounds in the last decade or so is that it used to be that most of the time the overheads were probably the bulk of the sound. The directs would be used to enhance them where required, sometimes just a kick mic. These days, as less and less realistic drums have become hip, it seems like more folks are using directs the most and using overheads as an ancillary thing.

Personally, I think it always sounds best if the overheads/rooms are providing the bulk of the sound. I will try to use as little direct mics as possible. This also much reduces phasing issues and bleed issues. I started off thinking that I had to have twenty mics, then slowly used less and less and the sound got better and better, at least in terms of what I think a good drum sound is. Overheads, kick mic, and rooms is a nice way to get a good sound, if you want drums that sound like drums.

Ultimately, IMO, if the overheads don't sound like you want them, then either use a different kit or, if recording your own, then adjust them. Or swap out just the snare and find a snare that has the right room sound. It's very common for drummers to try out lots of snares to find one that has the right sound in the room.

Dean,
 
Couldn't agree more, the OH and Room Mic really give the kit that natural, breathing ambience when done correctly....   The problem the OP is refering to is the unnatural loud volume of the snare in certain Superior Drummer settings.   There is a sub-mix setting in Superior for the Room and OH Mics where the snare is just too loud, it doesn't sound like how a real overhead mic would capture the kit.  I usually just crank it back so it sits in the mix where you would expect a snare level to be if captured from an OH mic.    If you are also adding in some of the direct snare mic the the kit mix in order to  EQ or add reverb to the snare directly, the result is a super obnoxious, loud snare sound.
 

at least in my application of superior drummer, i have found that when TOM 1 is hit it picks up a lot of the strainer from the snare. at first i turned off the bleed, then came to realize it sounds realistic.

I resisted adjusting bleed levels for a long time, thinking I'd be compromising realism. Eventually, I said the hell with it, those hats are hurting my ears and the kick sounds like it's in a cave. 

Since then I make no pretense of realism, cutting the kick out of the overheads altogether and reducing the hats by 50-75% and the toms by 25-50%. Then I always route the room to a separate output and a separate audio track so I can tweak it. I have even gone so far into the realm of physical impossibility as to automate the room channel so the drums become less ambient as the mix gets busier. 
 
The one thing I don't often do is reduce the snare bleed, but that's a personal preference. I just like to hear the ambiance on snare. If it's an aggressive, dense song I'm going to be reducing the overall room level anyway. If the snare really needs to pop, I like to insert an aux send on the snare track and mix a heavily-processed version under it. That effects bus usually contains a distortion plugin and sometimes a gated reverb or delay.

Also don't overlook the excellent transient shaper that's included with Superior. Just adding 1db to the attack makes a big difference when you're after a punchy snare. IMO it works much better than TransX for this, but if you're going to use the latter increase the "duration" parameter from its default value to encompass most or all of the attack phase of your snare hits, which are typically 15-20ms. If it's too short the drum sounds "ticky". I usually start at about 8ms for anything other than ride cymbals. 

To be fair, in order to offer a heavy bleed option, without doing it purely by fakery, the folks recording samples for stuff like BFD woudln't be able to do things like angle and place mics to reduce bleed. They need to get plenty of it so that it's available, and therefore most folks probably would turn it down somewhat, in order to get (albeit much more easily) what probably would have been done in most cases naturally via mic placement/angling.

So it's not necessarily 'fake' to turn down the bleed a good in BFD. Even back in the day plenty of folks worked to minimize bleed, according to the sound they were going for. Not everyone was looking to do Levi Breaks. I reduce it somewhat, but never a lot. It does mean that everything becomes interactive, which can be tricky. Change the snare EQ and suddenly other things can start sounding different, depending on how much they are bleeding into the snare mic.

But, again, since I use minimal direct mic's, bleed isn't nearly so much of an issue. Usually one of the kicks (wherever works best) and usually the top snare. Sometimes the floor tom if it's kind of weak in the overheads, which it sometimes is. But even then, they are mixed in fairly moderately, so the bleed isn't that big a thing.

The thing I started doing more and more was taking the time to audition various kits, and see what I could with a quick and miniimalist mix, mostly balance of minimal mics and one small EQ on the drum bus. If it was sounding very close after that, then I'd go with that one since it probably will require the least massaging. I'd prefer to do that than spend hours relentlessly tweaking EQ. Given that something like BFD, particularly with the expansion packs, gives you access to a number of kits that even high endy studios might not be able to keep around, you should make use of it.

And particularly snares, to play around with the snare that works best with minimal manipulation. One kit/share combo is almost always likely to have fairly close to the sound you want with just basic balance and a little EQ.

Good point, Dean. Very good point.

Speaking of minimising bleed in micing arrangements, I swear I've heard of some engineers even using physical objects in the path of overheads to snare etc so that cymbals are captured but snare bleed from direct source is minimised (obviously most of the remaining will be room and low frequencies). I enjoy working with BFD, but I guess the biggest difference is they record a generic sound as they don't know what you'll want to do with it. If you're recording a kit for real for a certain sound for s certain style of music, everything can be perfectly tailored. In BFD, it's a bit more luck that you find the right kit for the task. but with the number of kits available, that's probably not too big an issue these days..

I like the fact that BFD kits aren't pre-tweaked really. It makes for a lot more flexibility. But yeh, if you know you are going for a particular sound when recording a real kit, you can work towards with mic selection and placement, EQ and compression on the way in, and all that.
Another side effect of that is levels. Almost always you going to end up doing from a good bit to a lot of subtractive EQ because the stuff recorded is very neutral and so you end up having to remove what you don't want. So you can end up doing pretty large boosts to keep the levels up and make up for those cuts. You can only bring the signals over from BFD so hot.
 
When recording real drums, you can get good levels with a tone that's very close to what you want to have in the end. So probably better gain staging in that case, and less massaging of the tone. But, in the end, not getting kicked out of your apartment is probably a bigger win than not having to as much subtractive EQ I guess.
 
 

I like the fact that BFD kits aren't pre-tweaked really

That's the number 1 reason I use BFD, you can tailor it exactly where you need to. It's more fun anyway, getting to mix it from such a raw sound.


Interesting observation on the gain staging. Never thought about it that way before.