Mixer bleed? Seriously?

[Gary Gray]

In my home studio, I run an Alesis 32 mixing board (16 channels) into Delta sound cards (44, 66, 1010).

I recorded a 4-piece band in my studio last weekend (drums, electric guitar, bass and vocal). We recorded the tracks with all members playing together. Lead vocals were recut later. Bass, guitar and lead vocal were all in the same room, with guitar and bass going direct in. Drums were in a separate room with kick, snare, mounted toms and floor toms were miked with an AT3030 overhead.

In mixing tracks this week, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. I kept hearing "ghost" vocals in some quiet passages. Isolating a track at a time, I discovered I was hearing the scratch vocals. The only problem was that they were showing up in the kick drum mic.

Now, the kick drum mic was actually INSIDE the kick drum and the kick drum was in a separate room with the door closed. So there is no way in the world the kick drum picked up the vocal through the air. To me, it sounded like the lead vocal channel had leaked into the kick drum channel.

So, I turn to Google and sure enough, there's a phenomenon called "mixer bleed" where this kind of thing happens. And it's not at all uncommon.

Of course, according to sources, the nicer the mixer, the less of a problem this is.

Has anyone here had this kind of experience? It frustrates me, but I'm not making enough doing this to drop much money on a new board.

Thoughts?

[Mesotech]

I've heard of it, but never experienced it where I noticed.

Basically (from that I've read) some mixers share signal path on certain pairs or quads of channels. These are the ones that bleed through most. To correct the issue, try moving the vocals around to another channel of the mixer and see if the issue goes away. You might still get bleed through, but it might be on a differnt instrument that doesn't matter as much (such as bass and kick together).

[Gravity Jim]

It's called "crosstalk," and happens in some analog mixers. AS I understand it, it is a physical phenom, and should only be happening in tracks that are physically adjacent (or in busses that are). So I'm +1 with Mesotech... move the vocal and see if it goes away.

However, if you are hearing this "ghost" with all the faders pulled down except the kick drum, then I don't think it can be crosstalk that's occurring in the mix: that would indicate that it happened during tracking, and the ghost is printed on the track.... in which case, moving the vocal to another track won't help.

There is also the possibility that you accidentally routed a reverb return into the drum track (I've done this and spent a few minutes trying to figure out what in the stoopid hell I'd done, as there's no such thing as crosstalk in a digital mixer). It happens when I work too fast and fail to zero out the board before tracking, leaving a track or return routed into the same record buss as the new track without knowing it.

[Rickenjangle]

It happens when I work too fast and fail to zero out the board before tracking, leaving a track or return routed into the same record buss as the new track without knowing it.

Well, then if you do that, too, Jim, I don't feel too bad...

[Gravity Jim]

I've done the exact same thing.

Well, now I feel less stupid.

Dude, I've actually heard a ghost of the entire backing track somehow mixed into a lead guitar overdub, for example... and later figured out that I had left a mic open in the studio, routed into the same buss as the guitar, and it was picking up the whole track from the headphones I left lying on a music stand.

When you're expecting silence, it doesn't take much to sound loud.