A Trick To Reduce Headphone Click Bleed
Today’s tip is brought to you via Bryan Daste from the Magic Closet Studio in Portland, Oregon. Take it away Bryan…
I came up with a new trick for reducing click bleed from headphones into a close mic. Don’t you hate it when you record a great acoustic guitar track, only to play it back and realize your click is faintly audible in the track?
Try this:
On your click track, set up a Waves C1 compressor after the click plugin (or just on the track if you’re using a printed audio click). Set the sidechain input to an unused bus. Send your guitar signal to that bus.
Set the C1 to the Upward Compressor preset. This makes the compressor work “backwards” – when it hears a loud signal, it makes the signal louder rather than softer. And when the guitar dies out, the click attentuates – making it much less likely to pick up on the guitar’s mic.
The settings I liked on the C1 were:
- Makeup: 0
- Thresh: -41
- Ratio: 0.70:1 (crucial – the ratio has to be less than 1:1)
- Attack: 2
- Release: 54
- PDR: 0
Try it! It should work with acoustic intruments, vocals…anything where the source is relatively quiet and the headphones are close to the mic.
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I’ve found rolling off the high end of the click to be really effective in quickly reducing the bleed into the cans.
Thank you for this extra info on this technique Sydney.
Any idea how to do this in a DAW like Cubase where the click is not actually on a track. I don’t know of a way to process the click inside Cubase, but perhaps a way exists.
One way would be to build your own click on a mono channel with a couple of audio snippets, e.g. tambourine, cowbell, clave, etc.