gates - useful or a hinderance?

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stinkpot
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gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by stinkpot » Mon Feb 14, 2005 1:32 pm

so, i've wanted to use gates here and there, but have generally found them to A.) not work that well, and B.) just kind of make a mess of things. part of the problem, admittedly, is most likely the user, but i don't think that's the entire problem. i'm just wondering what situations you guys find yourselves reaching for a gate, and maybe a couple of suggestions of decent ones. i'm just talking about straight up gates here, not gated reverb.
thanks,
james

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by KennyLusk » Mon Feb 14, 2005 1:51 pm

I never track (or rehearse) electric guitar without a gate now. It's just a beautiful thing; an awesome tool. I use it on electric bass as well.

A gate on vox is really nice too.

It helps if the guitarist is used to using one though and if he's not it can be a nightmare teaching him/her. But once you learn how to used one you never go back.

Go light on your parameters at first then tighten everything down as you hear the dynamics of the instrumental performance. It's the kind of tool that just takes a little getting used to.

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by twitchmonitor » Mon Feb 14, 2005 2:00 pm

I usually gate toms. And snares, unless there's a bunch of ghost notes. And sometimes kick if the mic in front of the kick is getting a bunch of crappy cymbal wash from a sloppy drummer. I never gate a vocal track...I go through and cut dead space and fade by hand. Sometimes I use a gate to open a sine wave, triggered by the kick.

I use digigates, which don't use too much dsp. If they're not cutting the mustard, I'll use a Waves gate.

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by Professor » Mon Feb 14, 2005 2:00 pm

I think gates make a lot of sense for live sound, and they are somewhat useful in special situations when recording and mixing in an analog/linear/non-DAW type of studio. But I think that using gates or 'Strip Silence' in a DAW is kinda dumb unless you just have to work very quickly.
Don't get me wrong, I cut out the 'silent' parts of tracks on every recording I do, but I do it manually. Obviously it is easy enough to drop out the begining and end of every track on a daw recording and give each instrument a nice, clean start and even, controlled fade into the 'theoretical silence' when they are not playing. It is also easy and pretty obvious to drop out the vocal track or other parts if they stop playing during the song - for example if the vocals stop during a guitar solo, or if the guitar drops out on a bridge.
The next most obvious manual gating for me is the tom mics. I don't want all that bleed from the rest of the kit getting compressed, reverbed, and then weighing down the sound of the kit. And since the toms aren't usually hit a lot over the course of a song, it doesn't take terribly long to run through each track, and cut all the 'dead' space around each tom hit and then give each hit a short clean-up fade in and longer fade out to avoid clicks and blend better. Then in mixing I can really crank up the toms and give them huge reverbs and all sorts of things I might want to do without ruining the overall drum mix.
Of course, manual gating is a serious pain if you want to drop it on a kick or snare track, especially is the drummer plays dynamically with very soft notes here and there. Then the gate threshold needs to be set so low that a loud tom hit or hi-hat might open up the snare gate.

So I guess the short answer is that they are a great concept though the actual function of the automatic boxes are usually not as accurate as may be necessary.

-Jeremy

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by Professor » Mon Feb 14, 2005 2:19 pm

Simultaneous posts there, so I just read Twitch's comment on the sine wave generator, and indeed that is the one place where I do often use a gate more regularly. I run the kick drum out to one channel on the console and a sine wave out to the neighboring channel and setup a stereo gate triggered off the kick to fill out the sound with a tone somewhere between 50-100Hz depending on the song.
I've wanted to do the same on toms some time, but haven't had a session lately that has called for that experiment.

-Jeremy

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by cgarges » Mon Feb 14, 2005 3:14 pm

For me, there are few inexpensive gates that really work well, but I'm a gear snob.

It can be really difficult, especially with drums, to set up gates where they don't intrude on the sound of the kit. There's certainly a useful side to them, but it really can be a case of the surgery killing the patient. I prefer gates that have internal key filters, adjustable attack and release, and expansion settings or at least adjustable gain reduction. Using the filters can be really helpful in tuning out stuff you don't want and keeping that stuff from opening the gates. By carefully adjusting attack and release times, you can really control how much of what is getting through and by adjusting exactly how much gain reduction is occurring, you can make the gating more or less apparent. A unit with true expansion settings can be REALLY cool for making useful and transparent adjustments on, say, a snare drum with ghosted notes. This sort of thing can also make a less aggressive drummer sound more aggressive if you're careful.

A really good mastering engineer once told me that for restoration projects and remasters of classic albums, he uses things like noise reduction really sparingly and the second he hears it start to intrude, he's done too much. I think that can apply to LOTS of areas of creative endeavors and gating audio would certainly be one of them. If you have a unit that can make the above-mentioned adjustments, it's much easier to do what you want to do without affecting the audio in a negative way.

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by jc » Mon Feb 14, 2005 4:02 pm

cgarges wrote: inexpensive gates that really work well,
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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by Mr. Dipity » Mon Feb 14, 2005 4:21 pm

I really dig expanders and dynamics processors (ie - compression with expansion) when mixing and processing - as a creative tool as opposed to one for removing noise floor however.

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by brian_d_t » Mon Feb 14, 2005 4:58 pm

aside from the fact that i hate the way gating sounds, i feel like just passing the signal through one starts to degrade the sound (how often do you hear about a high quality gate?).
when i need to get rid of excess sound on a track, i usually just clear it out in protools.
i guess for live stuff, it's a good way to go.

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by Mark Alan Miller » Mon Feb 14, 2005 5:04 pm

Gates, when carefully used and judiciously set up, can do all sorts of wonderful things (not just taking bleed out of drum mics - that's actually not always the best job for them... and sidechain/key filters (internal or external) are usually a must in that application.)
Gates with adjustable attack, hold, release, and floor (depth) are the way to go, and well-built ones hardly, if all, damage the signal when "open". (Ashly & Drawmer both come to mind as having great-sounding circuits, and Valley People's stuff, while having a 'flavor' really sounds great IMO.)
Like any powerful tool, they can do as much damage as good. There is a reason I have many channels of them - they are useful, creative pieces in my racks.

I often automate, one way or another, things some people gate, like tom mics.
I also use the zero-crossing 'snap' that a overly fast gate can create to make a snare mic 'pop' a little more... Oh, the tricks... whatever works, you know.
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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by cgarges » Tue Feb 15, 2005 7:44 am

jc wrote:valley dynamite for life dawg.
Oh, I didn't say there aren't ANY. The Aphex 612 is still just stupid-rockin' and no one knows or cares about them. Haven't used a Dynamite, but I hear they're pretty cool boxes.

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by stinkpot » Tue Feb 15, 2005 8:28 am

So I guess the short answer is that they are a great concept though the actual function of the automatic boxes are usually not as accurate as may be necessary.
Based on my experiance I have to agree, hence my original post. I pretty much always do volume automation with things like toms, vocal tracks, etc with MX-View, and then any other fader riding that may be necessary. So I guess if I really want to get the full potential out of my gates, I need to experiment more with side chain and expantion - something I've wanted to do anyway.

Now with the sine wave generator trick, you're just allowing a short burst of that tone to blend in with the kick drum for added goodness? If I'm understanding that correctly, that my friends, is a cool trick. I'll need to mess with that.

Thanks very much - good stuff,
james

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by twitchmonitor » Tue Feb 15, 2005 9:31 am

stinkpot wrote:
So I guess the short answer is that they are a great concept though the actual function of the automatic boxes are usually not as accurate as may be necessary.

Now with the sine wave generator trick, you're just allowing a short burst of that tone to blend in with the kick drum for added goodness? If I'm understanding that correctly, that my friends, is a cool trick. I'll need to mess with that.


james
Yep...just add tuck it up under the kick. Or tom or whatever. Try it with pink or white noise instead of a sine wave on a snare.

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by thereminman » Tue Feb 15, 2005 9:45 am

two wierd popular assumptions happened when CD's were young:

1)it sounds better just cuz it's on CD

2)if you put it on CD, you better make sure you get rid of the hiss

Several much circulated Beatle bootlegs came out with a noticeable amount of gating on them to clean out the hiss and conform to rules 1&2 above.
This was some of the nicest sounding stuff that collectors had been privy to up to this point, but it was mucked up and bastardized by these annoyingly intrusive gates.

The story above, and having to endure hearing radio music in the late 80's have given me a life-long aversion to gates.

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Re: gates - useful or a hinderance?

Post by RefD » Tue Feb 15, 2005 10:10 am

indeed.

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