Headphone bleed is a pain in the ass. It’s where audio from your headphones is captured by your microphone while you’re performing. This is can be exaggerated when recording quite vocal sections.
The reason it’s a problem is that, if the headphone bleed is loud enough, it can change the overall sound of a mix.
Let’s say you were recording vocals over a beat, and then later on you decided to cut the beat for one or two lines. If the headphone bleed is too loud, you’ll still hear a bit of the beat because your microphone picked up the beat from your headphones while you were recording.
The Solution?
A lot of times headphone bleed occurs when the artist can’t hear themselves well enough, so they turn up their headphone volume. And, if the artist isn’t wearing good isolation headphones the result is headphone bleed.
One solution is using better headphones with good isolation.
Another solution is instead of only turning up the headphone volume, try turning down the beat first. Usually, that solves the issue of the artist not being able to hear themselves.
At the end of the day, if you need your headphones loud, get isolating headphones, or deal with the headphone bleed.
