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Post by gravesnumber9 on Feb 18, 2021 18:12:42 GMT -6
certainly not always useful, but very helpful on drums in dense productions. i'd imagine most folks can appreciate a top snare mic gated with a key input from the top mic, even if you're not mixing a metal record. if you're just using Glyn Johns technique or something similar, yeah, i can't imagine having much use for one there. but they are often useful for handling/ambient noise on vocal tracks or other things. you can certainly do a lot of this manually in your DAW, but sometimes a gate is just easier Even in metal, gates are basically like over miced drums: for easy sample replacement and cut n paste trickery. Why even play the drums at that point? Just fake it all. Most of these guys can’t play their own shit. I favor two good overheads, one mic per kick, snare, and a room mic. The toms will come up in the overheads. If they can play. Sometimes I have to crank the overheads or mic the toms with whatever. Editing toms sucks but nuking the room to get the image back is always fun. I'm with you there. Two things I've never said when mixing... 1) Let's turn up the high hat 2) Let's turn up those toms Ok, I've actually said 2) a couple of times but only for some really specialized parts where the toms were part of the song's "hook" (Day In The Life type stuff). Other than that, I like the toms like the drummer played 'em. Styles vary though along with the techniques to go with them.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 18, 2021 18:36:39 GMT -6
Even in metal, gates are basically like over miced drums: for easy sample replacement and cut n paste trickery. Why even play the drums at that point? Just fake it all. Most of these guys can’t play their own shit. I favor two good overheads, one mic per kick, snare, and a room mic. The toms will come up in the overheads. If they can play. Sometimes I have to crank the overheads or mic the toms with whatever. Editing toms sucks but nuking the room to get the image back is always fun. I'm with you there. Two things I've never said when mixing... 1) Let's turn up the high hat 2) Let's turn up those toms Ok, I've actually said 2) a couple of times but only for some really specialized parts where the toms were part of the song's "hook" (Day In The Life type stuff). Other than that, I like the toms like the drummer played 'em. Styles vary though along with the techniques to go with them. Yep. I will just notch and de-ess the high hat out of the overheads as I see fit if the drummer is annoying enough. If the guy who tracked it was an idiot and used garbage like Rode mics, experience tells me to saturate, notch, de-ess, and nuke the overheads together as a group before listening any more to them. Otherwise, my ears ring. Sometimes the toms are so out of whack you need to mic them, gate or edit them out of cymbal wash, and then dig to China with an optical or tube comp. This can all be avoided cranking up good overheads in the drummers headphone mix. There are no excuses when a stereo pair of KSM137 are under 700 bucks and the peak is easy to deal with.
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Post by brenta on Feb 18, 2021 18:59:59 GMT -6
In addition to what's already been mentioned, certain gates if set properly can be used to taper off the sound of a tom that is ringing too long.
Also, the famous/infamous gated reverb sounds of the 80's, which was WAY over used IMO. If you want to make your music sounds like it was recorded in the 80's, use a gated reverb on the snare. If you want it to sound like Phil Collins, use a gated reverb on the toms.
What I'm not sure has a purpose anymore are hardware gates. Do the people who say hardware ALWAYS sounds better think that about gates too? I used the drawmers back in the day, which were great at the time, but I would take the Fabfilter gate or the one on the UAD API Vision any day over the drawmers.
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Post by svart on Feb 18, 2021 19:17:00 GMT -6
You can play with envelopes of sounds with a gate as well. Or place them AFTER a noisy plugin (Pulsar EchoRec comes to mind) to KEEP your mixes clean. This. I use gates to soften the transients on things sometimes.
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Post by gravesnumber9 on Feb 18, 2021 20:03:14 GMT -6
You can play with envelopes of sounds with a gate as well. Or place them AFTER a noisy plugin (Pulsar EchoRec comes to mind) to KEEP your mixes clean. This. I use gates to soften the transients on things sometimes. Interesting. If I want to soften a transient I always reach for a compression with a fast attack using a FET type or something like that. It would never occur to me to use a gate for this purpose. What kind of a source would this work on? Color me intrigued.
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Post by svart on Feb 18, 2021 20:27:31 GMT -6
This. I use gates to soften the transients on things sometimes. Interesting. If I want to soften a transient I always reach for a compression with a fast attack using a FET type or something like that. It would never occur to me to use a gate for this purpose. What kind of a source would this work on? Color me intrigued. Something like a tom or snare. Set the gate to be a little slow on the attack and it'll round that front transient right off! The SSL 4k compressor was famous for that gate. Gate a snare a little slow, compress a little slow and add some high frequencies and you'll get a pretty common snare sound for rock.
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Post by ericn on Feb 18, 2021 21:50:42 GMT -6
Slight clickbait topic, I'll admit it. But I'm only half joking. People seem to love talking about how great this or that gate is (in a thread on this forum talking about the PA 9000J plug, this comes up). I see it a lot. What am I missing? I can see how gates were really important when using long analog signal chains with high noise floors, but if I'm on a fairly clean path... is there really a use? The only thing I can think of is "special" effects on drums and things. I'm a pretty straightforward guy in my recording style (less is more because the less I do the less I can mess up) but I'm also always on the lookout for stuff I'm missing. So what am I missing? I always assumed they were invented to make drum sets not sound like one instrument. You sir spent to much time in the studio and not enough out doing live 😎 There is just so much obnoxious noise out there that nobody wants to hear! That said yeah gates are over used and really are destructive as hell, but damn if they are not a quick fix 9 times out of 10 compared to finding the real issue.
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Post by gravesnumber9 on Feb 18, 2021 21:53:49 GMT -6
Interesting. If I want to soften a transient I always reach for a compression with a fast attack using a FET type or something like that. It would never occur to me to use a gate for this purpose. What kind of a source would this work on? Color me intrigued. Something like a tom or snare. Set the gate to be a little slow on the attack and it'll round that front transient right off! The SSL 4k compressor was famous for that gate. Gate a snare a little slow, compress a little slow and add some high frequencies and you'll get a pretty common snare sound for rock. Sounds like a fun trick to try. Easy enough. Thanks for the tip!
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Post by phdamage on Feb 20, 2021 12:01:44 GMT -6
certainly not always useful, but very helpful on drums in dense productions. i'd imagine most folks can appreciate a top snare mic gated with a key input from the top mic, even if you're not mixing a metal record. if you're just using Glyn Johns technique or something similar, yeah, i can't imagine having much use for one there. but they are often useful for handling/ambient noise on vocal tracks or other things. you can certainly do a lot of this manually in your DAW, but sometimes a gate is just easier Even in metal, gates are basically like over miced drums: for easy sample replacement and cut n paste trickery. Why even play the drums at that point? Just fake it all. Most of these guys can’t play their own shit. I favor two good overheads, one mic per kick, snare, and a room mic. The toms will come up in the overheads. If they can play. Sometimes I have to crank the overheads or mic the toms with whatever. Editing toms sucks but nuking the room to get the image back is always fun. while simple technique can work wonders for certain styles, it just can't cut it for those super dense hardcore/metal tracks - you need drums to punch through all those layers of distorted guitars and then disappear. realistic sounding? - not in the least, but it is what bands and players are imagining their songs sounding like and what they have been striving for since the early 90s. also, even the most intense levels of processing can't make a poor performance sound incredible. do i sometimes end up with a poor drummer that i'm enhancing with samples and processing? sure, and it absolutely helps. but you can't really sell it unless the drummer is pretty damn good, and fortunately for me, most of the drummers I work with in these styles are pretty solid players. Frankly, I find myself using samples most often these days for ambience - especially since I moved out of my giant live room.
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Post by Guitar on Feb 20, 2021 12:16:31 GMT -6
phdamage can you tell me more about "samples for ambience?" I'm getting more and more into drum samples lately, this idea is new to me. Usually when I think ambience, I think "add a reverb." So I wonder what you mean by this. Or do you mean add a snare sample that has some ambience built into it? What samples do you use? Thank you for the information.
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Post by phdamage on Feb 20, 2021 12:51:24 GMT -6
phdamage can you tell me more about "samples for ambience?" I'm getting more and more into drum samples lately, this idea is new to me. Usually when I think ambience, I think "add a reverb." So I wonder what you mean by this. Or do you mean add a snare sample that has some ambience built into it? What samples do you use? Thank you for the information. it is basically adding reverb, but it is a bit more realistic sounding. I usually pull up Trigger on my snare group or on a duplicate track (depends on the project) and pull in a bunch of room mic samples from my old giant live room and some a friend recorded when he had some sessions in the B Room at Electrical Audio - if you're unfamiliar, check out this space: electricalaudio.com/studios-and-facilities#StudioBits footprint is only about 800 sq feet, but the ceilings are like 30' high. and if you hear someone hit a snare drum in there, you'll recognize that room sound immediately - it has been on an awful lot of records. anyway, i just blend those ambient samples in anywhere from 10-35%, depending on the program material. if it's on its own track, i will sometimes compress it a little to draw out the room sound a little more. sometimes it means I don't need to use a reverb, but I often still want a little bit in there for length. most of the samples I use have fairly cranked snares (tuning wise), so it doesn't always work, but the pitching in Trigger sometimes does the trick. i can get a big sound with my tiny current drum room if no one is in the other live room tracking with live amps, but that is rare. The small one can get close with delays, but it isn't quite the same. I had my heart set on another huge live room but when I saw the space where some recent Unsane records were tracked and it was so, so, so small, I decided I could make it work in the spot I found.
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Post by phdamage on Feb 20, 2021 12:52:06 GMT -6
or you can just do andy wallace style and just send those roomy, triggered sounds to send to reverbs
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Post by drumsound on Feb 20, 2021 13:23:19 GMT -6
I always assumed they were invented to make drum sets not sound like one instrument. Ba dum tish! I'll be here all week. Be sure to to you bartenders and waitresses. I always assumed they were invented to make drum sets not sound like one instrument. You sir spent to much time in the studio and not enough out doing live 😎 There is just so much obnoxious noise out there that nobody wants to hear! That said yeah gates are over used and really are destructive as hell, but damn if they are not a quick fix 9 times out of 10 compared to finding the real issue. I avoid live sound like the plague!
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Post by tkaitkai on Feb 20, 2021 13:39:21 GMT -6
phdamage can you tell me more about "samples for ambience?" I'm getting more and more into drum samples lately, this idea is new to me. Usually when I think ambience, I think "add a reverb." So I wonder what you mean by this. Or do you mean add a snare sample that has some ambience built into it? What samples do you use? Thank you for the information. it is basically adding reverb, but it is a bit more realistic sounding. I usually pull up Trigger on my snare group or on a duplicate track (depends on the project) and pull in a bunch of room mic samples from my old giant live room and some a friend recorded when he had some sessions in the B Room at Electrical Audio - if you're unfamiliar, check out this space: electricalaudio.com/studios-and-facilities#StudioBits footprint is only about 800 sq feet, but the ceilings are like 30' high. and if you hear someone hit a snare drum in there, you'll recognize that room sound immediately - it has been on an awful lot of records. anyway, i just blend those ambient samples in anywhere from 10-35%, depending on the program material. if it's on its own track, i will sometimes compress it a little to draw out the room sound a little more. sometimes it means I don't need to use a reverb, but I often still want a little bit in there for length. most of the samples I use have fairly cranked snares (tuning wise), so it doesn't always work, but the pitching in Trigger sometimes does the trick. i can get a big sound with my tiny current drum room if no one is in the other live room tracking with live amps, but that is rare. The small one can get close with delays, but it isn't quite the same. I had my heart set on another huge live room but when I saw the space where some recent Unsane records were tracked and it was so, so, so small, I decided I could make it work in the spot I found. +1 to all of this. If I want to give the snare some space, a roomy/ambient sample almost always sounds better than reverb.
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Post by ragan on Feb 20, 2021 14:18:58 GMT -6
One of the truly amazing things about something like SD3 is that you can control what drums are in what mics. I often set up ambient mics that only have snare, or only snare and toms or whatever, and use them for ambience. Compress, gate, send somewhere else, whatever.
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Post by Guitar on Feb 20, 2021 14:22:26 GMT -6
One of the truly amazing things about something like SD3 is that you can control what drums are in what mics. I often set up ambient mics that only have snare, or only snare and toms or whatever, and use them for ambience. Compress, gate, send somewhere else, whatever. That's cool. So you can use, I don't know, your favorite room from the SD3 expansions for your snare reverb or whatever? I know they have some really good room sounds in there, really kind of impressive. I haven't tried blending SD3 with real drums yet, just trying to get them sounding good alone so far. I had some good luck blending Slate Trigger samples over the top of the SD3 snares and kicks, on two of the tracks I did, it helped a lot. Also, two of the kits I used needed a lot of mixing, like any regular drum mics would. One of the kits I used needed much, much less, was ready to go out of the box. I only have the stock library so far although I will likely expand very soon.
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Post by ragan on Feb 20, 2021 14:39:23 GMT -6
One of the truly amazing things about something like SD3 is that you can control what drums are in what mics. I often set up ambient mics that only have snare, or only snare and toms or whatever, and use them for ambience. Compress, gate, send somewhere else, whatever. That's cool. So you can use, I don't know, your favorite room from the SD3 expansions for your snare reverb or whatever? I know they have some really good room sounds in there, really kind of impressive. I haven't tried blending SD3 with real drums yet, just trying to get them sounding good alone so far. I had some good luck blending Slate Trigger samples over the top of the SD3 snares and kicks, on two of the tracks I did, it helped a lot. Also, two of the kits I used needed a lot of mixing, like any regular drum mics would. One of the kits I used needed much, much less, was ready to go out of the box. I only have the stock library so far although I will likely expand very soon. I was just talking about using SD3 exclusively, so just using certain ambience mics to only have the snare (or whatever) in them. But yeah, you can also use Tracker to stick a tracked snare in there and then just key whatever ambience mics you want. I’ve done that too. I’ve never used the stock library on anything I’ve finished. I can’t really deal with the enormous cathedral room sound that’s glued to everything. You can minimize it some with SD3’s envelope shaping, and I have gotten some cool sounds that way, but other libraries are just so much more like what I want that I just immediately got some of them and have used them exclusively.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 20, 2021 15:21:13 GMT -6
or you can just do andy wallace style and just send those roomy, triggered sounds to send to reverbs Most of the bands I work with think Slayer sold out both musically and production wise on Reign in Blood. But South of Heaven still sounds great.
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Post by phdamage on Feb 20, 2021 18:59:38 GMT -6
or you can just do andy wallace style and just send those roomy, triggered sounds to send to reverbs Most of the bands I work with think Slayer sold out both musically and production wise on Reign in Blood. But South of Heaven still sounds great. This blows my mind!! I know a ton of Slayer fans and have literally never heard that suggested ever!
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Post by jcoutu1 on Feb 20, 2021 19:28:26 GMT -6
Semi on topic, but I know a rad dude working on some trigger sample packs...
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Post by Guitar on Feb 21, 2021 4:10:33 GMT -6
Semi on topic, but I know a rad dude working on some trigger sample packs... Tell me more. If anyone wants to be a saint and put up some trigger or other drum samples for grabs I would be interested. For example that Alibini room, haha. I was thinking of making my own set, too, soon, seems like a big job though.
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Post by ragan on Feb 21, 2021 10:22:05 GMT -6
Semi on topic, but I know a rad dude working on some trigger sample packs... Tell me more. If anyone wants to be a saint and put up some trigger or other drum samples for grabs I would be interested. For example that Alibini room, haha. I was thinking of making my own set, too, soon, seems like a big job though. I use one shot samples from my own kits I’ve tracked over the years all the time. Used to do it in Trigger and now do it in SD3. Really great for layering.
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Post by Guitar on Feb 21, 2021 10:32:20 GMT -6
Tell me more. If anyone wants to be a saint and put up some trigger or other drum samples for grabs I would be interested. For example that Alibini room, haha. I was thinking of making my own set, too, soon, seems like a big job though. I use one shot samples from my own kits I’ve tracked over the years all the time. Used to do it in Trigger and now do it in SD3. Really great for layering. I have two really crappy ones of my Black Beauty, but I need to re approach it with a real attitude about doing it properly. I have used them in a few songs, though. My goal is to have multiple velocity layer samples of all my snare drums, my kick, toms too I guess, that I can load into Trigger. There's a new editor out for that program, so hopefully it should be easier now. The old one was kind of a pain.
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Post by johneppstein on Feb 21, 2021 12:58:58 GMT -6
Slight clickbait topic, I'll admit it. But I'm only half joking. People seem to love talking about how great this or that gate is (in a thread on this forum talking about the PA 9000J plug, this comes up). I see it a lot. What am I missing? I can see how gates were really important when using long analog signal chains with high noise floors, but if I'm on a fairly clean path... is there really a use? The only thing I can think of is "special" effects on drums and things. I'm a pretty straightforward guy in my recording style (less is more because the less I do the less I can mess up) but I'm also always on the lookout for stuff I'm missing. So what am I missing? A gate is useful for keeping the livestock in the barn when it catches fire.
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Post by jcoutu1 on Feb 21, 2021 12:59:40 GMT -6
I use one shot samples from my own kits I’ve tracked over the years all the time. Used to do it in Trigger and now do it in SD3. Really great for layering. I have two really crappy ones of my Black Beauty, but I need to re approach it with a real attitude about doing it properly. I have used them in a few songs, though. My goal is to have multiple velocity layer samples of all my snare drums, my kick, toms too I guess, that I can load into Trigger. There's a new editor out for that program, so hopefully it should be easier now. The old one was kind of a pain. I've started a trigger sample pack project. Bunch of different kits. Different tunings. 5 velocity levels. Everything is recorded, need to edit now. 90 minutes of snare one shots need to be trimmed and compiled, plus toms and kicks. Ton of work still ahead.
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