Noise Gate and other missing crucial effects

[RecordingMaster]

Hi there,

Adobe Audition has removed a few crucial things that are almost guaranteed to be used by ANYONE recording a song, such as the metronome. Ridiculous. Anyways, I am also finding there is NO noise gate feature? How in the world is anyone expected to do anything professional in this program when the basics of recording needs have been omitted.

Here is what I am trying to do if someone can tell me another roundabout way of doing it in AA CS 5.5...I am recording drums for my rock band and each drum is close mic'ed. Of course, there always bleed in each mic from other drums which I know is never totally unavoidable. But I'd like to at least noise gate say the tom tracks since they aren't hit nearly as much as snare or kick. That way, it'll clean up those individual tracks and make the overall drum track less muddy. No point in having an entire separate tom track taking up nearly the entire song with just bleed from all the other adjacent drums, and then maybe 1-2 actual tom hits in one specific song (maybe more in others of course).

I;d also like to noise gate the kick and snare so I can edit each of them to have theyre own reverbs, compression, etc without severely affecting the sound of the adjacent drums.

How can this be done?

Please help.

Thanks.

 

[Runaway]

It always amazes me how many different ways there are to do the same thing and how different people approach the same problem with no one way necessarily better than another.

"Adobe Audition has removed a few crucial things that are almost guaranteed to be used by ANYONE recording a song, such as the metronome. Ridiculous. Anyways, I am also finding there is NO noise gate feature? How in the world is anyone expected to do anything professional in this program when the basics of recording needs have been omitted."

Now its interesting that you mention this because I'm totally the opposite.

Now I will grant you that the metronome not yet being available is annoying but for me not a show stopper. If I use one its generally just to set the tempo for the band and until the metronome returns I have a physical one I route through the cans.

Let me explain how I work.

I love recording live drums and take great pleasure in getting the best sound (IMO) possible and here is how I approach it.

1. I have a purpose built room which helps by minimising reflections
2. I use mics like the sennheiser 421 on the toms and D12/RE20 to minimise spill (placement is also important)
3. Even more important is the placement of the overheads as you can 'wash out' your close mic'd toms if not careful)

All that stuff is pretty obvious but let me go on and say that I never use a noise gate and even with the points above I will manually clean up the tom tracks and kick track by using the clip envelope. Sure it takes a little bit of time but as you say the toms tend to be hit a lot less.
Anyway the results IMO are much better and I have more control.

Another other thing i will do is roll off the bottom end of the overheads using the parametric this will take out a lot of the toms and snare from the overheads allowing me more control over the close mic'd toms & snare.

All this becomes even more important the worse the original/raw kit sounds but obviously i do my best to get that right first.

So you can see that all the missing features don't affect everyone equally.

As I said there is no right or wrong way of approaching this problem this is just my way.

One last thing if you really find that you have too much spill and can't get around it by better placement etc then you can always fall back to using something like Steve Slate Trigger on the say the snare and that will clean it right up - you can even replace the snare with a sample from the original snare!

 

[RawDepth]

...I'd like to at least noise gate say the tom tracks since they aren't hit nearly as much as snare or kick...

I don't have my CS 5.5 yet, but in earlier versions you can use the mute feature to do this. It may still work in your version as well.

Simply double-click the tom track to bring it up in the editor window. Using your mouse cursor, highlight a section of the waveform where there are no tom hits. Then right click on the highlighted area and select "mute" from the pop up menu. It will flat line (or silence) everything that has been highlighted.

 

[bouldersoundguy]

Cool Edit (Audition's ancestor) could use DirectX plugins. Can't Audition use third party plugin effects?

That said, I haven't use a gate in ages, especially on drums. The problem is that by gating the bleed out of the toms it can change the sound of the overheads every time the gates open and close. Plus you can't rely on them opening consistently if the toms are played dynamically or if the snare is louder. If the bleed isn't bad enough to prevent me from using a gate I generally just edit out the space between tom hits because it's more accurate than gating.

 

[Bobbsy]

It can use any VSTs you can find (well, not VSTi plugins...no MIDI) but recent versions have dropped Direct X support.

Edited to add: I don't use CS5.5 (I stuck with 3.0) but from memory of my month's trial, dynamics processing is still there. If so, the preset called noise gate may be gone but it would be ten seconds work in the dynamics processing menu to create your own gate and save it in your preferences.

That said, I agree with most of the above about gates and drums. I sometimes use gates in live work but rarely in a studio mix.

 

[RecordingMaster]

Yeah I wasn't going to use a gate but I was getting bleed (in a controlled and treated room with proper acoustics, well tuned drums and exceptionally placed mics to avoid bleed). It happens. Especially for my floor toms since I didn't have enough floor stands. I had to use mic clips. I have wood hoops so the vibration of the kick drum really bled into the floor toms. So when I have all the mics on without a gate, it really muds up the sound, especially the kick and makes the kick less pronounced. I found a way to gate in the dynamics processing menu but it's not the best. It's working somewhat for me now.

But now suddenly Adobe Audition is recording every track late that I try and overdub. Each over dub gets later and later! It's driving me nuts. It's not my computer or interface or playing ability. It's basically rendered useless now.

Anyone know what the %!$%$#^@# to do? Please help.

 

[Bobbsy]

Several things to look at.

First, how are you monitoring? You didn't mention what sound interface you use but most decent ones have a function for "direct monitoring" (or some similar name) so your headphones have a mix of basic playback and the mic live (i.e. not on a round trip through your computer). This is always a better way to work.

Second, if at all possible, use ASIO drivers for your interface--much less latency than MME. If there are no ASIO drivers for your interface, download and try ASIO4ALL, not forgetting to set the buffer size as small as your system can handle without drop outs.

Third, no effects on when you're recording. Effects use a lot of processor time and can add to latency.

 

[RecordingMaster]

Several things to look at.

First, how are you monitoring? You didn't mention what sound interface you use but most decent ones have a function for "direct monitoring" (or some similar name) so your headphones have a mix of basic playback and the mic live (i.e. not on a round trip through your computer). This is always a better way to work.

Second, if at all possible, use ASIO drivers for your interface--much less latency than MME. If there are no ASIO drivers for your interface, download and try ASIO4ALL, not forgetting to set the buffer size as small as your system can handle without drop outs.

Third, no effects on when you're recording. Effects use a lot of processor time and can add to latency.

I'm using a TASCAM US 1800 into a brand new 27" imac with 16GB of ram and a terabyte hard drive. My monitors come straight out of the interface. The only thing connected to the mac is a USB 2.0 from the interface. No effects on while recording. And regardless of what drivers I use, I don't see how that matters because it WAS working for a half album's worth of different instrument takes. And now one day it was back and forth (either coming in late or sometimes on time) and now everyday it's constantly out of sync. I downloaded Audacity Free crappy program just to try it and see if over dubbed tracks were off time as well and they were not. I tapped my pen on the table and recorded that. Then mic'ed the monitor speaker while recording a new track and mic'ed that tap sound. They were both perfectly in sync. Then tried in Audition and they were almost perfectly OFFSET from each other like a delay effect. Horrible! So I know it can't be the computer or ram or my playing or my driver or the interface.