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Post by mcirish on May 25, 2021 9:10:05 GMT -6
Every once in a while you run across a tool that makes your life easier. here's my latest.
I do quite a bit of live drum recordings and as we all know, cymbal bleed has been a real bear to deal with, especially if you used an MD421 on the toms. I moved away from the 421's a few years ago and life got a little easier. Still, to get a tight mix, I have to handle cymbal bleed in the tom mics and front of kick. I've tried so many things. For the last few album projects, I manually cut the tom hits and then used a gate with a lookahead for the kick and sometimes snare. That was probably fine but I can always hear the cuts, even though I do fades on each clip. So, in my search I've gone though four different processes: 1) Clip gain and/or cut out all the nasty bits and fade each tom hit 2) Use a good gate with lookahead. My favorite was DMG Track Gate 3) Use a multiband gate with lookahead. Cymbal Killer was used on a few tracks but has some bugs. The others I tried did not do what I wanted 4) Oxford Drum Gate - should have skipped right to this one
I just finished the drum portion of a mix yesterday that has a lot of tom patterns that really needed to be clear but not have cymbal wash in them. Oxford Drum Gate is pretty incredible at removing the cymbals and keeping the natural decay of the drums. It has a lot of tweakability. It learns the pitch of the drum you want to gate, allows you to set the reduction and the threshold as well as do some leveling. So far, I have not found anything that can do all this so easily. I actually like it better than manually cutting up the tom tracks. It sounds great IMO. I held off on it because of the cost ($230). That was too steep for me. Sweetwater has a sale on it right now and that made it a no-brainer. If you do a lot of real drum recordings, this is a time saver and worth checking out.
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Post by gravesnumber9 on May 25, 2021 11:20:33 GMT -6
Thanks for posting this. I'm doing live drums all the time and this is a constant battle. I also don't personally favor a close mic sound but that results in endless clip gain battles weird snips that, like you said, I am convinced I can eternally hear even if others say they can't. I'll check this out!
Question... is this a real sale? Or is it one of these things that is always on sale.
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Post by svart on May 25, 2021 11:28:14 GMT -6
Thanks for posting this. I'm doing live drums all the time and this is a constant battle. I also don't personally favor a close mic sound but that results in endless clip gain battles weird snips that, like you said, I am convinced I can eternally hear even if others say they can't. I'll check this out! Question... is this a real sale? Or is it one of these things that is always on sale. I dunno but for 58$ I'm not sure it matters. Seems the demo stuff online really makes this look unique and powerful so I bought it.
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Post by gravesnumber9 on May 25, 2021 11:32:07 GMT -6
Thanks for posting this. I'm doing live drums all the time and this is a constant battle. I also don't personally favor a close mic sound but that results in endless clip gain battles weird snips that, like you said, I am convinced I can eternally hear even if others say they can't. I'll check this out! Question... is this a real sale? Or is it one of these things that is always on sale. I dunno but for 58$ I'm not sure it matters. Seems the demo stuff online really makes this look unique and powerful so I bought it. Kinda my thought too. $58 seems worth taking a chance on something that at least attempts to solve a legit challenge. Even if it's no better than my current gating solution, seems like it will certainly be faster.
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Post by bradd on May 25, 2021 11:59:28 GMT -6
I use FabFilter ProG regularly on snares to keep out the hihat bleed. I wonder how this compares.
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Post by stormymondays on May 25, 2021 12:40:22 GMT -6
I'm tempted to buy it just in case I ever need it. I remember I was very impressed with the demo. But usually I can get away with manual cutting of the toms, or even with no gating. Hmm...
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Post by Deleted on May 25, 2021 13:30:45 GMT -6
Hell i need a good gate. So tempting.
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Post by Deleted on May 25, 2021 13:48:02 GMT -6
mcirish can this extract the audible tom hits from almost solid walls of recorded wash? I’ve had that problem with very poor recordings I’ve been sent and just manually edited and faded it to the hits and most of the to reenforce the equally bad overheads that had three de-essers on them.
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Post by mcirish on May 25, 2021 13:50:39 GMT -6
It's definitely a sale. I've never seen it that low before. It sure worked out great for me. I thought a multiband gate was hard to beat but this is much more accurate on what to gate and what not to gate. On some tracks, it was almost magic. OK, I will stop the infomercial....
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Post by popmann on May 25, 2021 14:18:49 GMT -6
Are they doing like Harrions's Tom Gate? Where you teach it what the tom sounds like...and it adjusts the expander to listen specifically for that sonic fingerprint to open? I thought that was pretty ingenious use of something that only digital can do...
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Post by ragan on May 25, 2021 14:29:05 GMT -6
One of the most impressive drum gates I’ve ever heard is the Slate one. Pretty sure it’s based on the gating in Trigger, which is amazingly good and people asked for it as a standalone processor for a long time.
That said, if I were in the market for a gate I’d be more inclined to jump on a good Oxford sale than a damn VMR module.
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Post by Mister Chase on May 25, 2021 14:45:55 GMT -6
Bought. Thank you.
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Post by mcirish on May 25, 2021 15:07:00 GMT -6
Are they doing like Harrions's Tom Gate? Where you teach it what the tom sounds like...and it adjusts the expander to listen specifically for that sonic fingerprint to open? I thought that was pretty ingenious use of something that only digital can do... Yes, it does have a learn function so it can really work with just that specific drum. Very cool
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Post by mcirish on May 28, 2021 15:16:29 GMT -6
Well.... Working on a mix today and the song just stopped playing back. After a few minutes, I'm finding that the Oxford Drum Gate uses 10-15% of the total CPU per instance. Waaaaay too high for a gate. It works really great but the coubhit makes it impossible to use on each of the drums. I'm pretty disappointed in this. It seemed really great. I've got a pretty fast computer. Bummer Back to manually editing tom hits or use a low CPU gate like TrackGate by DMG.
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Post by jcoutu1 on May 28, 2021 15:21:05 GMT -6
I'm using it on a punk track today. Better than a lot of gates, but still not good enough for fast punk stuff. Can't get the release clean enough without cymbal clamp, but the opening of the gate is fantastic.
Now I'm using it in front of trigger, and the triggering is going great.
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Post by jeremygillespie on May 28, 2021 15:29:23 GMT -6
Well.... Working on a mix today and the song just stopped playing back. After a few minutes, I'm finding that the Oxford Drum Gate uses 10-15% of the total CPU per instance. Waaaaay too high for a gate. It works really great but the coubhit makes it impossible to use on each of the drums. I'm pretty disappointed in this. It seemed really great. I've got a pretty fast computer. Bummer Back to manually editing tom hits or use a low CPU gate like TrackGate by DMG. Can’t you just process or commit the track?
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Post by mcirish on May 28, 2021 17:36:13 GMT -6
That is possible. I guess it's just a different way to go about it. I tend to like to keep those options sort of open until the end but maybe I just render those tracks with the gate and then continue on.
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Post by drsax on May 28, 2021 19:46:49 GMT -6
Every once in a while you run across a tool that makes your life easier. here's my latest. I do quite a bit of live drum recordings and as we all know, cymbal bleed has been a real bear to deal with, especially if you used an MD421 on the toms. I moved away from the 421's a few years ago and life got a little easier. Still, to get a tight mix, I have to handle cymbal bleed in the tom mics and front of kick. I've tried so many things. For the last few album projects, I manually cut the tom hits and then used a gate with a lookahead for the kick and sometimes snare. That was probably fine but I can always hear the cuts, even though I do fades on each clip. So, in my search I've gone though four different processes: 1) Clip gain and/or cut out all the nasty bits and fade each tom hit 2) Use a good gate with lookahead. My favorite was DMG Track Gate 3) Use a multiband gate with lookahead. Cymbal Killer was used on a few tracks but has some bugs. The others I tried did not do what I wanted 4) Oxford Drum Gate - should have skipped right to this one I just finished the drum portion of a mix yesterday that has a lot of tom patterns that really needed to be clear but not have cymbal wash in them. Oxford Drum Gate is pretty incredible at removing the cymbals and keeping the natural decay of the drums. It has a lot of tweakability. It learns the pitch of the drum you want to gate, allows you to set the reduction and the threshold as well as do some leveling. So far, I have not found anything that can do all this so easily. I actually like it better than manually cutting up the tom tracks. It sounds great IMO. I held off on it because of the cost ($230). That was too steep for me. Sweetwater has a sale on it right now and that made it a no-brainer. If you do a lot of real drum recordings, this is a time saver and worth checking out. thanks for the heads up. Love the sonnox stuff. Gonna grab this!
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Post by phdamage on May 28, 2021 20:24:14 GMT -6
Having just spent about 3 hours today editing Tom tracks for half a record, I’m hoping this makes the second half of the record a helluva lot easier. I will report in a couple days.
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Post by gouge on May 29, 2021 5:51:26 GMT -6
wondering if anyone has compared to softubes dynamite?
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Post by jcoutu1 on May 29, 2021 7:00:17 GMT -6
wondering if anyone has compared to softubes dynamite? No, but this, I can nearly guarantee is better.
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Post by Deleted on May 29, 2021 8:44:00 GMT -6
I'm using it on a punk track today. Better than a lot of gates, but still not good enough for fast punk stuff. Can't get the release clean enough without cymbal clamp, but the opening of the gate is fantastic. Now I'm using it in front of trigger, and the triggering is going great. Thanks pretty much what I wanted to know. If it won’t work for punk, it won’t work for death and black metal with real drums. Editing and fading Tom mics is time consuming but I’ll keep my 60 bucks. The awesome Oxford EQ is about to go on sale June 1st though. I might bite on that.
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Post by gouge on May 29, 2021 15:34:28 GMT -6
wondering if anyone has compared to softubes dynamite? No, but this, I can nearly guarantee is better. well it's on sale.....
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Post by jcoutu1 on May 29, 2021 16:08:14 GMT -6
No, but this, I can nearly guarantee is better. well it's on sale..... I have a thousand software compressors and a hardware dynamite that I don't use. For me, this gate is something much more innovative and will be used much more than the dynamite would. I like digital that does things that analog doesn't, and this brings something to the table.
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Post by rowmat on May 29, 2021 16:57:51 GMT -6
I’m wondering if my mid 2012 MBP could cope with this resource wise although I’m not doing band work as such these days. Also is the discounted version limited in terms of an upgrade path? Will you get slugged down the road for updates compared to the full priced version?
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