Gating my drums hearing flaming....

[Dark star Balla]

I'm gating the drum recordings snare top and bottom and kick frnt and bck. As I gate I hear flamming (doubling). Any experience with this? Anyone have any suggestions?

[Rodgre]

Are you hearing the flam with the gate off? Sometimes you'll hear a "flam" on a kick drum because the drummer is keeping the beater against the head, creating a double hit. I know there's a better way to describe what's happening, but it's the difference between striking the head and immediately releasing the pedal, and pressing the pedal and staying there.

Have you adjusted the release time of the gate for a longer decay? If you have the gate set for too short of a decay, you may hear the gate double triggering.

Are you doing this on an analog setup or in a computer? If analog, what kind of gates are you using?

I haven't used gates for years, but there were some techniques I used, which will work whether you're using analog patching on a board, or in a computer. I would sometimes send the track to three faders. One would be untouched, a second would have a gate on it, and the third was used to trigger the gate. That allowed me to EQ that channel for the least amount of bleeding instruments to create a sidechain signal for the gate. Sometimes I would gate that track with a short decay time so it would essentially create short bursts at the attack of the drum, and then send that gated signal to the sidechain of the gate that's on the 2nd channel.

Then you blend the ungated drum with the "pop" from the normal gated track for a more natural sound. You can use as much or as little of the ungated sound as you want. You can take the gated track out of the main mix bus and just send it to a reverb, if you're looking to keep your hats out of the reverb wash.

Roger

[Dark star Balla]

Hi and thanks rodgre,
No you cannot hear it without the gate on. I played the drums on this track and have listened to it un effected a hundred times checking for errors. while there are a few light hits on the kick and snare there were really no problems. Your suggestion about the release time seemed to work tho. I chose to gate instead of edit out the bleed. I have the drum tone I'm extremely happy with but do you anyone else have any tips for getting that really big drum mix I'm looking for? BTW.... I recorded in Sonar 5PE, DA7, 1884 using waves plugs and cakewalk gates. The Kick is mic'd front & back the snare is mic'd top & bottom. Any other info you may need let me know.

Thanks for your help.
- Kevin

[cyantologist]

just a couple ideas for some of those things that could be easily overlooked..

is it possible that the threshold on one of the snare mics is set too high and therefore causing the gate to only open up on some hits and not others? i made that mistake not too long ago and it was driving me crazy trying to figure out why the snare sounded either way too dull or way too loud.

at first i was wondering if it could be a phase problem, but i guess that wouldn't make sense if it sounds fine without the gate.

maybe i don't know exactly what you're talking about when you say "flamming," but i would imagine that the problem could be resolved by experimenting with the threshold and release on the gate.

please post when you figure it out, i'd be curious to know..

[darjama]

What plugins are on the track? It sounds like maybe there's a latency compensation problem. It may not be the gate, it could be one of the Waves plugins that's introducing the latency.

[Dark star Balla]

By flamminig I meant doubling or one track is slightly delayed. There are no other efx on at this time. gating is the first thing I'm doing so I haven't put any others on yet. My thresholds are in the high 30's and 40's and my release times are in the high 100's.

[darjama]

I'll bet you it's a latency compensation problem, the gate must be introducing latency.. If you solo the top snare and gate that, do you hear the flam? Or is it just when there are more than one track going?

Out of curiousity, does the same thing happen if you use a different gate? Try floorfish:

http://digitalfishphones.com/binaries/t ... s_v1_1.zip

[Dark star Balla]

If I solo wiithout the gate no but with the gate yes. But I got it solved now I think. I just kept playing with the release & hold times. now I'm trying to get this click out of the end of my frnt kick drum hits. It's like the sound of a badly truncated sample.

[Mark Alan Miller]

now I'm trying to get this click out of the end of my frnt kick drum hits. It's like the sound of a badly truncated sample.

That sounds like the gate opening up on a non-zero-crossing of the waveform... theshold's too high, maybe, for it to open fast enough not to chop off a little bit of attack transient, leaving the sudden jump in amplitude as the gate opens, and the resulting audible 'click'. Lower the threshold as low as you can, or slow down the attack time just enough to eliminate the pop.

As an aside, I find that inter-drum bleed is part of getting a 'big' drum sound in many cases - and that gating, while tightening up the bleed, actually makes the drums sound smaller...

[Dark star Balla]

As an aside, I find that inter-drum bleed is part of getting a 'big' drum sound in many cases - and that gating, while tightening up the bleed, actually makes the drums sound smaller...

Oh ok, I thought it was the opposite. Well now I'm re-thinking the whole gating thing.

[cgarges]

As an aside, I find that inter-drum bleed is part of getting a 'big' drum sound in many cases - and that gating, while tightening up the bleed, actually makes the drums sound smaller...

I'll second this. Reducing some of the ring from toms and things can tighten up the low end a bit, but using a good, reliable expander and only reducing 2-4 dB can do this much more effectively with less artifacting. I rarely use gates on kick and snare any more unless there's some kind of issue like too much hi-hat in the snare mic or some sort of phase problem with bleed. They can be really great, under-rated problem solvers, but I don't really find myself automatically gating stuff like I did years ago.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[Rodgre]

I'll third this. I remember the day back in 1992 when I decided to take the gate off of the kick and snare tracks on a mix and all of a sudden I realized that I had been killing some great drum sounds. I'm sorry that we're derailing your thread about gating, but if you're interested in big drum sounds (and not big drum machiney sounding sounds) then bleed is your friend. Good sounding drums played well in a decent sounding room is the place to start. Close mics blended with room and ambience mics.

Roger

[cgarges]

Good sounding drums played well in a decent sounding room is the place to start. Close mics blended with room and ambience mics.

Mostly in-phase.

Chris Garges
Charlotte, NC

[Mark Alan Miller]

Good sounding drums played well in a decent sounding room is the place to start. Close mics blended with room and ambience mics.

Mostly in-phase.

Agreed. I often check many combinations of mics on a kit to see which ones fare better with a polarity flip... like maybe the kick and snare work better with the overheads flipped, or maybe flipping the top snare makes it work with the bottom snare and the overheads... where the kick already sounded good with the overheads. Stuff like that, for example.

And regarding gating. When I do gate, it's usually as Chris said, to reduce a little hat bleed or something sometimes. And I set the floor of the gate to only close down a little, like 2 or 4 db... But other times, I'll do the same thing - gate the top snare mic a couple of db - but to sculpt a little more attack vs body component to the snare. But I don't gate much at all on drums now. If I've got cymbal bleed, or maybe sypathetic ring on a tom issues, I'll expand a little (low ratio stuff) or just draw automation for the tom hits, closing the mics down 5 or 10 db between hits. I can customise the decay for each hit that way with the latter. Provided I'm not working on the analog multitrack, that is...

[ashcat_lt]

check the drummer's wrists.





I had to.