Three minute reads for artists and producers
who want to make better records

By Thomas Dulin

Hello Reader, here's this week's Take Three email.

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TAKE ONE: QUICK LINKS

• Apple has announced their M3 chips and their new line of Macbook Pros. (Link from B&H)​
• ​Gobbler has closed shop suddenly, removing access to their plugin subscription bundles. Originally, Gobbler was a tool that allowed you to backup your DAW sessions to the cloud automatically. RIP.
• Spotify plans to stop paying royalties on songs with less than 100 streams. (Forbes) My take: this is a good thing. Read the article.

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TAKE TWO: RECENT RELEASES

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Sounding Joy Ellie Holcomb PREVIEW   ​

Ellie Holcomb's "Sounding Joy," released late last year, has won a GMA Dove award. I had the honor of recording the children's choir on the song. Congrats to Ellie and producers Nate Dugger and Brown Bannister!

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TAKE THREE: How To Stop The (Click) Bleeding

We’ve all been there (and if you haven’t, your time is coming, trust me)…

You just recorded the perfect take. Your ego is swelling. “I am the best at this,” you say to yourself. “Music is so easy.”

And then you listen back and hear the faint sound of the click “bleeding” or spilling from your headphones into the recording you just made. Brutal.

You want to avoid this happening.

Before you delete the take, there are a few ways you can potentially salvage the recording, and I’ll get to those in a second. But the best way to level up your engineering skills and avoid ruining a take is to prevent your click from bleeding in the first place.

Here are a few ways to do that:

Listen for it before you record.

If you’re in a control room, tell your performers to be quiet for a moment. Hit record, turn up your monitors, and just listen for any click coming into the mic. If you hear it, ask the offending talent to turn down the click a bit.

Use another click sound.

If I have an artist who really needs a lot of click track, I’ll use the “MPC” click sound in Pro Tools. It’s much more discreet than the default sound, and usually allows for more level before it’s discernible through a microphone.

Do not monitor the actual click track during recording.

This only applies if you’re the engineer recording someone else from a separate room… I never monitor the actual click track in my studio. This way, I know that if I ever hear a click happening, it’s bleeding from someone’s headphones.

Use another pair of headphones or in-ears, if available.

If the seal cups on your headphones are aging, you can find replacement cups for most headphone models online.

Make sure there are no unused headphones lying around the room.

Always unplug or mute extra headphones lying around the studio. This also helps prevent damage to them from unexpected pops and other loud signals.

Turn off the click in sections where you don’t need it!

One of my favorite tricks is automating the click to mute on the last note of a song. Typically this is where click bleed is most prone to happening, as the last note of a song rings out.

Pan the click to one side of the headphones.

This is especially useful if the performer is pulling an ear off to hear themselves naturally. That can lead to a lot of bleed if you’re not careful!

When the damage is already done

If it’s too late for avoidance and you find yourself trying to deal with click bleed after the fact, there are a few options you can try.

My favorite is “De-click” from iZotope’s RX bundle, or even the RX restoration software itself. It’s usually best to use this tool on a selection of audio, rather than as a plug-in insert. (Audiosuite in Pro Tools, “selection-based processing” in Logic, etc.) There may be other software solutions as well, but I’m not hip to any others.

Another option is to mask the click bleed with another source. Years ago I added grandfather clock samples over some click bleed that I captured. The song was about the passing of time, so I leaned into it and made it sound intentional!

Perhaps even adding a pad or some sustained chords to your song would be enough to mask a quiet click in the background.

Finally, I have heard of engineers using the clever trick of a low pass filter, where the frequency is automated from high to low during the last note of the song.

If you have any other creative solutions to avoiding or fixing click bleed, please hit reply and let me know.

Until next week, happy music making, Reader.

Thomas Dulin Producer / Engineer / Mixer