Hi folks. I'm trying to clean up a snare track, recorded by a fledgling death metal band that insists they will not use triggered drum samples. Can you help?? I was not present for the recording but I am helping to mix the material. There was one mic on the snare. No matter what I do, I cannot get enough of the bleed from the rest of the kit gated out! Unfortunately, there is a wide dynamic range between the softer and loudest hits, and tons of cymbal leakage. Perhaps it's the gate I'm using, but I can't seem to get the snare hits separated enough, to then compress them and even out the levels. Just when things start to sound usable, I get chatter from the gate. (This is the Sonitus Gate in Sonar 8.5) This is agressive music and I need a snare that at least occasionally punches through the wall of guitars. Yes I know I have major ringing at about 270 and 480-500 to EQ out, and I'll do that first. :) I've tried boosting 3-5K but then I get tons of cymbal noise along with the snare attack that I'm trying to bring out. Boosting the fundamental around 160 doesn't help much and makes the drum sound too tubby. So, do any of you have tricks or procedures to recommend? Or am I hoping for too much here? 320K mp3 of the track is here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/...roblematic%20snare.mp3 Thank you for any help and suggestions, and happy holidays! Chris

Unfortunatelly I cant listen to the track right now but here is what I personally think.
I dont mean to discourage you, but unless you have phase problems, it doesnt worth the hassle to completely "clean" a recording like that.
Usually in cases like these, the bleeding is during and in between the snare hits so if you completely "isolate" the snare hits it is going to sound weird.
Try as an experiment to manually edit the snare track for a few measures by hand.
Select the waveform between the hits where you can here the cymbals.
Note the frequencies.
Then insert silence at that part or cut out 10-15 db
Cut some of those frequencies with a filter or eq from the snare hits
Use an AUX Reverb to make it "breathe" a little so that it doesnt sound chopped off. 
If you like it, repeat a thousand times lol
 
Good luck!
 

Link's not working for me.

I Was going to say gain automation to bring the lower hits up within reach of the threshold range before going to a gate or expander. The Sonitus plus or minus the punch' and eq features is quite capable. On the other hand won't go where a nice graphic dynamics tool is sometime the better tack (BleuCat I'm familiar with) But in my estimation after hearing it, no way will you get a gate fix especially in those fast and low hits. Extensive manual editing? Wow. And even then most of the energy is (likely) in that 'bong/ring, and very little in the way of top to grab'. Maybe you can find some salvation in the O/H's?
 
 ..and compressing(?) ..is what you do when you have too much dynamic- or at least enough spare to work with.

I was once faced with a similar scenario, in which the drum track was hopeless but the drummer would have been unhappy with substitution. After hours of tedious automation I finally said f*ck it, I'm putting in a sampled snare. It worked great, everybody was happy with the sound and I looked like a hero. The key to making it work: I didn't tell anybody what I'd done. Just sayin'.

I'm with Bit, It is so easy to do a replacement and then find something close ( or better) with session drummer. If you have access to the snare that used go and sample it. Then your not really using a Phony sound at all.  

I just did a whole album. I didn't tell the drummer I replaced his kick ,, I even used TTs1 , he commented on great the kick was. 
Go to my sound cloud link see what you think , skip first song, "see daylight", that's not one of them. That's canned. 

Just a very slightly off-topic question. What's everyone using to do drum replacement. I don't presently have any way of doing it and would like to be able to.

AMEN BIT!!!

Ive had to use this trick as well    
You can also layer it in with the original track just to keep some of the bleed in for ambience
(Bleed can be good in a lot of mixes when used right IMO)


A/B it for them and see what they think once you have it done

Another thing I also have tried/like with this is to clone the track and cut everything where I could and bosst other places with the EQ I didnt want or needed to boost and layer it with the oriinal to make it stand out more.

But from what Im hearing on yours, its an awesome candidate to use AudioSnap to grab the transients and just replace it with the Copy As MIDI icon and add your sample along side the oriinal  

If you're absolutely dead set on not using drum replacement, I'd just go in with a volume envelope and surgically remove, or at least attenuate, the spill & bleed that's present on the snare track

Attenuation might be a better bet - the sudden drop to digital silence might be exactly what the track DOESN'T need - reducing it to 20dB or more below the wanted audio might sound a lot more 'alive'

It'll take a fair amount of time to get it right, but this is quite a common problem so don't baulk at the idea of spending at least an hour on this

You asked what we are using for drum replacement. 

I think most do as Mike say's and use Audio snap, get your settings just right so it's only  shows  the snare transients, and then copy to a midi track. 
It is a little fussy to use at first so read the help and tutorials as you go. If I go a couple of months without using it I always have to bone up on it again. 

Once you have a MIDI track then it's a ( not so ) simple matter of picking the snare drum sound you want. Like I said, you can even sample the original snare. I use  TTS-1 kick that I modified a bit,  for example, and for snares I'll dig around in the Session drummer library. There are endless sample available , most are free. This is what take the time is auditioning sounds. But once you've gone through the process you'll never look back. 


I tried tool copy into wave lab which is pretty easy to mess around and get rid of noise, but in the end, the sound was not right. The replacement sounded much better. 

Note, this works best for solid transients. It won't work as well on things like a jazz snare played with brushes. Or with ghost notes. 
This is where mixing the 2 tracks might be necessary.