It's not just for Phil Collins anymore.

Roger Lavallee
Patchbay
roger@curtainsociety.com

When I think of gated drums, I'm not necessarily thinking of "gated reverb" be it real or a preset on a Quadraverb. I'm thinking of the sound of a gate opening with every hit of the respective snare, kick, tom, etc.

The tell-tale signs are things like the hi-hat all of a sudden being MUCH louder when the snare hits. The decay of the drums tends to be quicker, but blended in with overheads, it's less noticeable.

Back in the dark days of the 80's and into the early 90's, gating was used as a way to "fix" things that engineers thought needed to be fixed. I'm not sure if it was because drum machines, with their tight sounds and individual outputs were so influential on the sound of records at the time, or if all of a sudden the world decided that records needed to sound as unreal as possible (see future discussions on Eventide processing and the Rockman.)

Nowadays, the tide seems to have turned in two ways. One is that people are actually liking the sound of a "Drum kit" again. Some people have taken this to another extreme with heavy compression on mono drum mics, which will probably be a very "early 2000's" sound when we hear it twenty years from now. The other thing to change the tide is the use of Protools and other visual editors that allow you to do two things: draw in pinpoint-accurate volume automation that is much better, and much more predictable than using a gate, and the ability to easily trigger or replace sounds.

I know that triggering has been done for years (back into the 80s..... anyone remember the Wendl? Anyone remember the AMS delay? The Korg and Roland sampling delays? Some of us still rely on that stuff for drum replacement!) but the visual format of the DAW has made it so easy to go so far overboard replacing drums down to the smallest grace note.

I won't turn this into a rant about how DAWs have made lazy engineers and lazy musicians out of a lot of use by the ability to "fix it in the mix."

Nowadays, when I think of gated drums, I think of it as an effect. I think of "Hard to Explain" by the Strokes.... I think of some of Martin Hannett's stuff.

I think it's kind of cool how something that was developed as a tool to maintain, rectify or fix problems can be used for unique and interesting effects..... especially gates with external trigger inputs..... gating keyboard drones from a drum track. Gating vocals from beatboxes..... etc.

That and I'm glad that drums, at least for now, are more or less sounding like drums. At least on the records that I like...

--Roger