PLEASE HELP! Trying to Gate and Improve Snare Track

J

jmz93

New member
Hi folks.

I'm trying to clean up a snare track, recorded by a fledgling death metal band that insists they will not use triggered drum samples. Can you help??

I was not present for the recording but I am helping to mix the material. There was one mic on the snare.

No matter what I do, I cannot get enough of the bleed from the rest of the kit gated out! Unfortunately, there is a wide dynamic range between the softer and loudest hits, and tons of cymbal leakage.

Perhaps it's the gate I'm using, but I can't seem to get the snare hits separated enough, to then compress them and even out the levels. Just when things start to sound usable, I get chatter from the gate. (This is the Sonitus Gate in Sonar 8.5) If I should try other gates, what do you recommend?

This is aggressive music and I need a snare that at least occasionally punches through the wall of guitars.

Yes I know I have major ringing at about 270 and 480-500 to EQ out, and I'll do that first. :)

I've tried boosting 3-5K but then I get tons of cymbal noise along with the snare attack that I'm trying to bring out. Boosting the fundamental around 160 doesn't help much and makes the drum sound too tubby.

So, do any of you have tricks or procedures to recommend? Or am I hoping for too much here?

320K mp3 of the track is here:


Thank you for any help and suggestions, and happy holidays!

Chris
 
I usually don't gate. The bleed is not a negative thing to me. But I also don't do metal, so I understand that, for that type of sound, you want to get a lot more separation, especially since most drums in that genre are triggered samples, etc....

The only thing I can suggest is to try putting the gate AFTER the compressor. Maybe the more leveled signal will be easier to gate? Just throwing that out there.
 
When there's enough bleed to be a problem there's probably too much bleed to effectively gate out without wrecking the stuff you want to keep. That makes them pretty much useless for fixing bleed. It's beyond me why people still try it.
 
If you have a snare hit somewhere in the project that is hit alone (without cymbals), I would use that as the trigger sample. They likely will never know if you do it right. :)
 
I messed with gating my snare for awhile and finally said screw it. Now I just go into the snare track and erase everything that's not a snare. It's a pain in the ass and time consuming but I get a tighter sound.
Other than that, I've also dropped my input signal a few times so it didn't pick up as much and then boosted it later.
This seemed to help (a little), and it was easier but I got a cleaner sound from just erasing.
 
jmz93 said:
Hi folks.

I'm trying to clean up a snare track, recorded by a fledgling death metal band that insists they will not use triggered drum samples. Can you help??

I was not present for the recording but I am helping to mix the material. There was one mic on the snare.

No matter what I do, I cannot get enough of the bleed from the rest of the kit gated out! Unfortunately, there is a wide dynamic range between the softer and loudest hits, and tons of cymbal leakage.

Perhaps it's the gate I'm using, but I can't seem to get the snare hits separated enough, to then compress them and even out the levels. Just when things start to sound usable, I get chatter from the gate. (This is the Sonitus Gate in Sonar 8.5) If I should try other gates, what do you recommend?

This is aggressive music and I need a snare that at least occasionally punches through the wall of guitars.

Yes I know I have major ringing at about 270 and 480-500 to EQ out, and I'll do that first. :)

I've tried boosting 3-5K but then I get tons of cymbal noise along with the snare attack that I'm trying to bring out. Boosting the fundamental around 160 doesn't help much and makes the drum sound too tubby.

So, do any of you have tricks or procedures to recommend? Or am I hoping for too much here?

320K mp3 of the track is here:


Thank you for any help and suggestions, and happy holidays!

Chris
Click to expand...

What you need is a noise gate that can focus its attention on one certain frequency. There are several around, but here is one that is free and I really like it. Go to digitalfishphones.com and download a plugin suite called The Fish Fillets. It is a small batch of VST plugs that are all pretty cool. Anyway, there is one within the group called FloorFish, that will do what you want. It has a handy little feature called "Listen" which allows you to set a frequency that the gate will listen for. Meaning that the gate will only open when it hears that frequency. Once the frequency is set, you can turn off the listen mode and it will remember the setting.

Maybe you can take advantage of that 270 Hz ring to trigger the noise gate. Then once you have the gate working the way you want, filter out the ring using EQ after the gate. Compression can be done last if you still feel it is needed.

Hope this helps.
 
As suggested above, gate after the compressor and use a frequency sensitive gate. I gate snares some of the time to get the sound I want depending on music type, and a good gate with the ability to select frequencies that tripper the gate work well. Try EQing the snare sound after the gate so boosting frequencies does not cause the gate to trigger early.

Alan
 
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