Gating.

[Nakatira]

I`ve seldomly used it.

But this last time I was mxing I decided to give it a go on drums.

It was easy to get to work decently, when the dynamics ever even.
But when it dropped and say the drummer was just doing light triplets on the snare, it dissapeared.
If I lovered the threshold, the damn hi-hat came in again.

So it dident work for me


how do you cope with uneven levels, (on purpose for the song offcourse)
I dident find compressing before entering the gate helping much either.

[Erockrazor]

Originally Posted by Nakatira

I dident find compressing before entering the gate helping much either.

For starters, compressing is making the audio dynamic tighter, thereby creating less of a chance to gate the unwanted audio as it will be closer in volume to what you want to keep.

If you get better isolation on say your snare mic, you may be able to gate it without the hats getting into the mix. But if it's not done right when tracking, fixing it in the mix isn't going to be easy. Same thing with sample triggering, you need good separation/isolation between the mic's or else you will be triggering the kick sample when you hit the floor tom.

I honestly don't use gates much for this reason. I dont get enough isolation between mics (on drums) to make it entirely practical because then I'd be taking out the gentler snare rolls and such.. But if you're a little more adventurous, there is always automation .. you could automate the threshold to come down for those snare rolls. But I haven't taken it that far yet. Good luck! Eric

[SouthSIDE Glen]

Originally Posted by Erockrazor

For starters, compressing is making the audio dynamic tighter, thereby creating less of a chance to gate the unwanted audio as it will be closer in volume to what you want to keep.

If you get better isolation on say your snare mic, you may be able to gate it without the hats getting into the mix. But if it's not done right when tracking, fixing it in the mix isn't going to be easy. Same thing with sample triggering, you need good separation/isolation between the mic's or else you will be triggering the kick sample when you hit the floor tom.

I honestly don't use gates much for this reason. I dont get enough isolation between mics (on drums) to make it entirely practical because then I'd be taking out the gentler snare rolls and such.. But if you're a little more adventurous, there is always automation .. you could automate the threshold to come down for those snare rolls. But I haven't taken it that far yet. Good luck! Eric

Couldn't have said it better myself.

G.

[Nakatira]

Yeah I thought about automation, just thought it might be a better way.

anyways I was just experiemnting, ended up not using the gate.
My drummer is gonna use less noisy hats

worked like a charm on toms though

[TomT]

I only have one thing / question to add to a great post by Erockrazor.

Which parts of the drums were recorded to their own track?

If you have the Hi Hat on a separate track, than you should be ok with gating. If you have overheads and kik/snare tracks, then maybe just mic placement and some filtering will do the trick.

Don't forget to use the "range" setting to your advantage (if your gate has that). Sometimes gating at 50% or so helps more than full on gating. If the range is at full blast, then you go from silence to open gate, and it can be too dramatic.

Gates are wonderful pieces of gear. I use them to remove unwanted noise, to create gated effects chains, and to alter the swing of my rhythm tracks sometimes as well.

[mattr]

I rarely gate things, but when I do I find it really useful to set triggers for particular frequencies. The gate plugin from Reaper (which you can download the VST separately like I have - you don't actually need to be using Reaper) allows you to set the gate to only trigger for sounds between particular frequencies. You can also set up sidechains with gates and use an EQ for the same effect.

This allows you to be more specific and precise with how the gate is triggered, for example you can have it so it listens only between 200 and 500hz, reducing the chance that highs from the hi-hats will cause a false trigger.

Other than that, try to reduce the amount of hi-hats in the snare mic to begin with. Use the polar pattern of the mic to your advantage and try to angle the null towards the hats. Its surprising how often people complain about hi-hat bleed yet they have the snare mic facing from the front of the kit towards the drummer; practically pointing at the hi-hats!

Instead, have the snare mic coming in from the side so its under the hi-hats. You'll need to check that the mic won't get hit when the drummer plays the hats and, if needed, persuade the drummer to raise the height of the hi-hats by a few inches. Try as hard as possible to have the rear of the mic pointing straight at the hats (this is all assuming you're using cardioid mics )!

Alternatively you can try to live with the hats in the snare track (apart from if you're doing metal or other genres with stereotypically isolated and separated drum sounds). It may sound horrible solo'd by itself, but look at the kit as a whole - once its in the mix you probably wouldn't notice it anyway. After all you should be aiming for the best possible sound from the overheads and just use spot mics to reinforce parts of the kit. This may even go as far as cutting most of the highs in the snare track (which would solve the hi-hats problem anyway) and keeping it low in the mix, just to add a bit of extra low/mid-end punch to the snare sound in the overheads.

So I think I reached a bit of a different conclusion at the end there, which is to reduce the amount you listen to the track individually (ban yourself from using the solo button !) and think about how they fit together as a whole.



EDIT: I saw you mentioned toms... quite often I find myself manually cutting up tom tracks and taking out the silence myself. It doesn't take long, especially on a song without many tom hits.

[Rokket]

Originally Posted by mattr

EDIT: I saw you mentioned toms... quite often I find myself manually cutting up tom tracks and taking out the silence myself. It doesn't take long, especially on a song without many tom hits.

That's how I've done it when I wanted to get more clarity in the drum tracks. I just cut out all the space where there were no tom hits. I tried it with snare and kick tracks, but it took almost an hour of cutting to get a 4 minute kick drum and I was missing a lot of the natural reverb. So now I just eq the crap out of it if I don't want all the mic bleed. But most often, the kit sounds better with the bleed and some careful eq...

[Nakatira]

Originally Posted by mattr

.



EDIT: I saw you mentioned toms... quite often I find myself manually cutting up tom tracks and taking out the silence myself. It doesn't take long, especially on a song without many tom hits.

I used to do this, but after I used the gate, I went with it

[LeeRosario]

Originally Posted by Nakatira

I`ve seldomly used it.

But this last time I was mxing I decided to give it a go on drums.

It was easy to get to work decently, when the dynamics ever even.
But when it dropped and say the drummer was just doing light triplets on the snare, it dissapeared.
If I lovered the threshold, the damn hi-hat came in again.

So it dident work for me


how do you cope with uneven levels, (on purpose for the song offcourse)
I dident find compressing before entering the gate helping much either.

Well for starters, it's usually not incredibly effective to compress before gating. You can do it for effect, but in a practical setting, not the best thing to do. The original intention is to filter out any noise or unwanted ambiance to help bring out a cleaner track during compression.


Another approach to catching low level stuff the gate can't pick up could be pretty simple...if you have an extra track, mic stand and mic laying around. This also involves some automation.

It's similar to the way you mic for a drummer who hits a snare in a regular fashion and side stick in the same song. You'll find that in that senario, you can mic the snare with two top mics. One specifically for loud normal hits and one specifically for subtle playing. That's like your second mic. You'll mute that for most of the song.

You process each according to the best sound it creates. So for example, you'll EQ, compress, gate your main mic however you choose to. Your second mic, you treat that seperately. More than likely, you'll have that muted for most of the song.

In the mixing process, you simply just automate your mutes to swap out one channel for the other. If it's done right, the transition should be seamless.

Just another way of hitting the dynamics of snare tracking and mixing.

[whjr15]

Can't you just manually go in and edit out whatever parts you don't want? Or are you not ITB? Or am I completely missing something here?

[Supercreep]

I gate the toms and kick, and try not to gate the snare.

[Farview]

In order to gate the snare in that situation, you would need to sidechain the gate using an EQ to make the gate sensitive to the snare and not the hat.

Some gates are better and more natural sounding than others, so YMMV.