Are people using expanders and gates on...

[cliepe12]

...drums these days?? I've been watching videos on drum miking techniques, but the material is somewhat dated, and I can't see how you can get a natural sound by gating everthing even if your settings are correct. It seems like if you have a gate on the snare, it would be fine until you hit the snare with the high hat (or another nearby mic) then it would cause a temporary rise in the level of the high hat.

Anyway, what are people doing these days??

[where02190]

I never use gates on drums. If I need to bring down something I automate, however drums are IMHO one big insturment when played as a traditional drumset, and I treat them as such. the interaction between the drums ia a critical part of the overall tone.

[dBHEAD]

I have tried using gates on drums with mixed results. I have found that if you mic the individual drums right in the first place, and set your threshold just right, you usually don't have too many problems with one part of the kit inadvertantly opening the gate for a nearby mic (unless we're talking about overheads or rack tom mics here). However, I frankly see very little advantage in gating drums except in one circumstance:

If you want to put a fair amount of reverb on the snare, you can gate it pretty hard and the gate tends to close before it picks up leakage from the rest of the kit. This tends to seperate the reverb on the snare, which is usually exactly what I want when doing it this way.

You have to be careful about attack and release times, and you might want to use downward expansion rather than a gate because it sounds more natural.

[bzldzl]

I try to avoid gates too but sometimes I have no choice. For example after recording a band over a weekend, later I relized there was way to much hihat in the snare track. This should have been delt with during recording but it wasn't. Anyway I love the gate on the Ren Channel by Waves, very limited controls and easy to dial in. I think the mistake people make is trying to get rid of all unwanted sound with the gate. With the snare track I was working with I set the floor to around -18db, this made the track sound more like a properly miked snare instead of one with a gate on it, the hihat and the rest of the drum set was still audible but quited down enough to get rid of the excess hihat.

Good Luck.

[audioeric]

I'm just using gates on the toms.. it's decently easy to get those to open and close at the right times.. best of all, I have drawmer gates so I can set the frequency key to the tom and let it open to that tom, or at least close.. it works decently well.. the kick won't open up the 1st tom.. but it's not super accurate.. i sort of like the bleed over from a high hat in the snare.. and I actually end up getting plenty of toms in the overheads.. so, anyway..

eric

[cliepe12]

thanks for the comments!!!

[WestPhillySoulzition]

Gate toms period. I find ungated toms can often blur up a set, even using 421s. Often i will strip silence on toms or just hand edit them. I see and hear this done very often, but it also depends on how you are micing. If you are going for roomy boomy sound of older rock songs ...back up, and dont gate. But if you are going for tighter micing with more mics. use gates on Toms , kik and maybe bottom snare. I really only gate if my sounds are already well isolated with mic placement(like inside kik, under snare, 2" from toms), that way with the snare you can EQ and get the kik out and the crack in. but then again, you should also try to do things differently everytime.