I'm currently mixing my bands cd and I've got trouble with cymbals. We recorded the drums using one mic for the snare, bass drum, floor tom, mounted toms, and two overhead mics to pic up the cymbals. The problem is that the overhead track has a huge amount of high hat for some reason and not much of anything else. ie the other cymbals are really quiet. Due to bad placement of the snare mic theres enough high hat in that track even after I EQ it out a little so right now im just not using the overhead track at all, but because of this the other cymbals are way too quiet.

Anyone got a solution for this?

What sort of mics did you use? They were condensors, right? That's weird that it happened like it did... Were all the levels OK prior to the recording?

Anyhow, there's not much you can do now to salvage what you have, so your best bet would be either to get the drummer to do overdubs or to manually place samples from DFH or BFD. Better yet would be to manually place samples of the drummers own cymbals, if you have any recording of them isolated.

Yeah condensors, theres no real chance of getting overbuds done at any stage, samples may be an option but at the moment it looks like they'll just be really quiet in the mix. It was a really low budget recording $120 AUD for 7 days in the recording studio at school and we had to do everything ourselves. Its coming out sound pretty good but there are problems.

Well, the cymbals and hihat are usually surprisingly low in the mix anyways, so you might try just putting the levels down according to the hihat, that is if the other cymbals aren't completely inaudible then.

Gate your snare and tom mics to get rid of any extra leakage. It's going to be real tricky to get the hat out out the overheads, try eq's out 3-5 khz and boosting 8-10. If your on pro tools, you could manually ride the volume of the cymbol hits up.

On our new forum http://www.evenlight.com I've got a section only for engineering questions... if anyone is interested.

Haha Pro Tools I wish, Sonar 1. Thats right Sonar 1, not that its a bad program by any means but they are acually up to Sonar 4 these days so it's a tad outdated. I've managed to get a reasonable amount of hi hat out of the snare and tom mics, that hasnt really been much of a problem. I'll try the EQ you suggested for the overheads though. Thanks heaps. Ill post a track or two up when I'm happy with them, hopefully they don't sound too awful. This is my first time and all.