effects inside a Desktop studio

[metalj]

I am currenty trying to get at least a good sounding demo out of my boss br-1600(desktop studio). Drums are the hard part. I need some sort of gating effect to tame down the cymbol crashes. I asked the Boss help desk(since the unit has no gating effect in it. It has every other effect but gating) about this problem and all they could tell me was that it would be up to me to figure out the controls of the compressor/limitor. somehow i could manipulate those to tame down the cymbols? I have also messed around with a few effect patches used for vocals that have a "noise suppressor" in them, but the decay is awful on the cymbols and sounds really unnatural .

other than hooking a seperate gate unit on the front end of recording, does anyone out there have any experience they could share with me??

also, is there a differnce between "noise gate" and "noise suppressor" ?

THANKS
Merry christmas

 

[kylen]

I can't find the manual for that thing online but if it's got a [downward] expander you can to tame down the decay of the cymbols and probably a little of their body.

A noise gate is generally more severe and is set to cut more dB once the decay of the instrument crosses a certain threshold - this is usually to keep other nearby instruments from bleeding thru. Noise suppression is generally more gentle and allows more of the instrument decay to trail off down to the noise floor where you generally want it to mostly silence things. It can also ride the decay tightly enough to cause it to occur sooner removing resonances, reverb & ambience tails - sometimes a good thing to tone down if it's too much.

Noise suppression, dynamic noise filter, or downward expander should take care of your cymbol problem I would think (without hearing it). There's probably something like that in the Mastering Toolkit on the 1600.

 

[peopleperson]

Yep. I don't think you need a gate for that situation. A gate leaves the signal either all the way on, or all the way off. I frequently throw gates onto tom mics instantly because when the drummer is not hitting particularly the floor tom, it tends to give off a low end rattle that is annoying. The gate when set properly, will shut off the mic when the drummer is not hitting the drum. My suggestion for your problem would be multiband compression. You can literally compress only the highs of that channel if need be. That's great for taming the cymbals, and my favorite is Waves C4 multiband compression. Does the job and doesn't ruin the signal.