To gate or not to gate....

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5stringer

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Trimming away the dead air from kick and snare drum tracks is
a very tedious process as Im sure everyone hates. Would a gate be
a better option, or is trimming just a necessary evil?
 
5stringer said:
Trimming away the dead air from kick and snare drum tracks is
a very tedious process as Im sure everyone hates. Would a gate be
a better option, or is trimming just a necessary evil?
Click to expand...
You could do it either way. As long as the gate is cutting everything else out and still opening for the softest hits (ghost notes on the snare, etc...) there's nothing wrong with gating. But make sure your attack and release settings are perfect. A too long attack will cut out the initial attack of a drum, for example.

Another option is to just let it bleed. It's not always a bad thing. I personally never gated until recently, where I've tried it on kik and snare for a couple of tunes and all I can say is that it depends on the song.
 
Thanks for the reply! I find there is plenty of bleed from the overheads so I just wanted to trim the kick and snare to kinda clean things up a bit. If I were to do nothing, just leave the tracks full, does this have a negative effect on the entire mix?
 
If your using OH mics plus spot mics...I personally don't bother trimming away the "dead air" on the kick and snare, since the OH mics are going to pic up a ton of ambience anyway, and the kick and snare just add to that.
It will sound like a kit sounds in a room.
 
I like to use side chain gating, it's only really a time saver in pro tools though. With Tab to Transient you can add a short burst of sound on each hit of the snare or kick on another track then move them all a bit backwards, say 5ms or so. Use that to open the gate on the snare track and you get all the little hits and ghost notes with all of the attack.
 
I find that if I ever need to do a bunch of touch up work with eq, especially on the kick like adding more low end or what have you, it can make everything else too low end heavy. When I gate the kick though, it all seems better and I just manipulate the kick and not the ambiance. The same is true sometimes for snare reverb. If i don't gate and add a ton of reverb to the snare, all of a sudden my whole kit gets pushed back. Sometimes it's cool and sometimes it drives me nuts. I like to start with no gate, and if i don't like what's happening i'll try one out.

Does this happen to other people too? How might you deal with that?
 
stevieg11 said:
I like to use side chain gating, it's only really a time saver in pro tools though. With Tab to Transient you can add a short burst of sound on each hit of the snare or kick on another track then move them all a bit backwards, say 5ms or so. Use that to open the gate on the snare track and you get all the little hits and ghost notes with all of the attack.
Click to expand...

I don't want to sound like an arse, and i apologise if i do, but isn't that exactly what the "lookahead" function on most software gates is for? tbf, either way would work and you get a much smoother attack sound (especially on kicks).

Gating is one of those areas where there is no right or wrong (like most of recording and mixing) and everyone has a different view of it. i personally like to gate toms on pretty much every drum track as the low end resonants from the toms ringing in sympathy with the rest of the kit can very quickly muddy up the sound, and I will do kicks and snare if it's really needed.

The best bit of advice i ever got given was to only reduce the gain between -6db and -20db. the human ear is amazing at being able to hear even the slightest differences in volume, and if you have you gain reduction set at -100dB, when the gate opens the volume has possibly increased 100dB in a matter of milliseconds. trust me, your ear will notice! if, however, you set the reduction quite low, the jump is much less and sounds much more natural. At -20dB, the spill is practically silent, but even at -6dB it makes a noticeable difference, especially on snares where you have to be pretty careful not to kill the sound with the gate
 
I have found that if there's enough bleed to be audible there's enough bleed to change the tone (of the overheads or whatever) when the gate opens. I don't like the sound of my overheads changing along with every kick or tom or snare hit.

Sometimes when mixing live I gate the kick if the bass amp is making it resonate, but otherwise I haven't used gates in ages.
 
Frankly, the obvious answer is "try it and see if you like the effect". As bouldersoundguy says, there's generally an audible change of tone when the gate opens and closes. Sometimes this effect can be desirable, other times less so, depending on what you're after.

My personal preference is to sometimes (but far from always) gate the kick drum because the sharper edges to the sound can give it a bit more punch--but rarely do the same on snare, OH, etc. However, there's no right or wrong--it's all down to the sound you want.
 
Hmmm...I wonder if there's a way to gate these double posts I keep seeming to end up with...
 
It all depends on what you are after, how much processing you are doing to the individual drums and how much of the overall drum sound is coming from the overheads.

When I do my typical metal mix, the overheads are pretty low in the mix, compressed to death and have the low end taken out. So most of the sound of the drums is coming from the spot mics.

Those spot mics are EQ'd to death and compressed, so if I didn't gate or edit out the bleed, all the cymbal wash would be louder and harsher in those mics than they are in the overheads. So gating is a must. Whether I use gates or edit depends on how well the gates work for that particular performance.

There is usually a 'strip silence' function on most DAWs that will do most of the work for you, if you decide to edit instead of gate.

Bottom line is to just do whatever works in each instance.
 
I rarely hard gate anything. Most of the time I will use a gate as an expander so it will just bring the sounds you dont want down to a manageable volume that most of the time wont interfere with the overall sound. It also helps when there are ghost hits on snares. If done right ghost hits on the snare will be reduced when expanding but the room and overheads will add those back into the mix. Experiment with gates but if not done right can easily make things sound very unnatural. But also the bleed can actually help the drum sound as a whole.
 
Hmm, I only have one noise gate plugin. It blows balls because I can't control the closure speed, (it closes instantly.) Can anyone suggest a smoother one?
 
RawDepth said:
Hmm, I only have one noise gate plugin. It blows balls because I can't control the closure speed, (it closes instantly.) Can anyone suggest a smoother one?
Click to expand...

I've been happy with the Sonitus that came with Cakewalk. Lookahead, good speed ranges, hold, punch' eq is cool.. It does pretty much all I need for drums.
But it does not do low/varible ratio expansion chores.
Sonitus:fx Suite Download

The eq is straight forward, verb, delay both usefull, other goodies..
 
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