Gating my drums hearing flaming....

[Dark star Balla]

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

No apologies needed. I welcome the knowledge. I need all the info I can get. Tho I'm not looking to open a major studio I want to make excellent recordings when I do record a project.

[T-rex]

This probably won't work in the box, but I read this a couple years ago and it rules for those few times I have to gate something. Your gates may have this built in or maybe you could do a sidechain but here's what I do.

I duplicate the track I want to gate. Take the duplicated track and run it out to the key of my dbx gate and move it back around 20 - 40 ms. Then take the normal track and run it through the normal gate channel. The duplicated track actually triggers the gate to open a little bit before the normal track goes through so you don't get any of that nasty click/truncated sound from the gate cutting off the front part of the wave. You can nudge the duplicated track back and forth till you get the correct opening. Some gates have a function like this, I think the Aphex ones do and I think the Logic plug in gates do too.

As far as big drums, definitely phase and a combo of close and room mics. The phase has to be right, on everything. It should sound great and everytime you pull the fader up on another mic channel it should sound better. That and the parallel compression thing, should get your drums sounding sweet.

[Mark Alan Miller]

The 'create a duplicate track, nudge it earlier in time and use it to key the gate trick' works really well in-the-box, provided your gate plug-in has a key in.
To do it out of the box digitally would be similar, and to do it analog, one must run the tape backwards and record the 'trigger' track to another track through a short delay...