Advice regarding bleed and guide tracks for drum session.
Hi Reddit, currently I record, mix and produce music from a single large live room. I have a drum recording session coming up in a month and need advice or feedback regarding bleed with this particular session.
The artist I’m working with is new to recording and isn’t comfortable with using a click track but is comfortable with drums. The song is fantastic and is a folky number so I was looking at my options for recording without a click. My first idea was to have the artist play the song in the room with the drummer, but have them positioned as far away from the drums as possible. They would also be separated by a tall and wide baffle that could act as a partition.
I am working with max 8 inputs, 6 are taken up by drums, leaving only 2 for an acoustic/vocal guide. I am used to doing live band recordings but as I’m going to be working with limited inputs, I was worried about capturing a nice clean acoustic and vocal with 2 mics in the room with drums so I relegated this to being a guide track with the intention to re record acoustic and vocals after.
My questions are, if I’m only using the acoustic and vocal recorded with the drums as a guide, and even if I can reduce the source/direct acoustic and vocal from bleeding into the drum mics with the baffle, could I see problems with bleed in the reflections picked up by the drum overheads and room mics?
Also, would this negatively affect the sound of the acoustic and vocal, or would any reflections captured just add a little depth to the recording? Could I encounter phase issues?
Any feedback would be very much appreciated.