Turtlerock Forum

What do and don't people gate and why?

Too many people gate too much.
If there are ringing/resonating drum issues I would like the sound crew to tell me and we can work something out with the drums themselves.. Sadly, 90% of the time no one says a word, then at some soundcheck halfway through the tour I notice there is no drum in the PA when I'm playing at half volume.
I do play with dynamics, and I must say I'm shocked how many times the drums are tightly gated and the sound person doesn't see me playing in a quiet part of the song and wonder why there are no drums in the PA.
I think Angus has a good approach. Gate with a low threshold to kill errant noise.
But if the kick or toms are ringing and resonating too much..... please tell me.

I tend to gate kick and toms. Snare if there is too much of anything. I do mostly one-offs so I have to work with what I've got.

I find I get an idea of the drummers playing style after the first few songs and then disengage any gating if it prevents the playing style to come through.

If in doubt - dont gate

sometimes gate to remove the kangaroos hopping past, but just can't keep the dogs and chooks out ;-)

.............rather go surfing myself.

Can I come Chris?
What about gating on signals other than drums?

i gate kick and toms.
and nothing else.

i gate the toms pretty hard, usually i get enough in my overheads, and when they hit the tom, really just want the definition/ crack and verb send.


now here is something i used to do with george (cause they went from very very delicate, to full blown rock out)
every drum has 2 mics (kick in and out, snare hard and soft, toms y/split)
one set is gated and sent to a VCA
other set isnt and sent to the next VCA
you can then "blend" your drum sound between full bore rock gated/ hard sounding/ short verbs etc to your other open/ soft/ long verb kit.
blend to suit the song

a word of warning is that you need to know the band/ songs to do that!!!

i actually had most of george miced this way.
gtr (57) rock gtr (441) soft, bass (DI) rock beyer69 soft etc etc
i could totally change the sound of the band with a couple of VCAs (and sometimes in songs like spawn, did it halfway through the song)

I've done similar for guitar for a band that moved between rock, metal and funk.

Lee wrote:Can I come Chris?
What about gating on signals other than drums?

I've always wondered if gating would work for vocals in theatre. I've seen too many theatre guys miss too many cues and it would seem that would solve the problem....

gigpiglet wrote:
<now here is something i used to do with george (cause they went from very very delicate, to full blown rock out)
every drum has 2 mics (kick in and out, snare hard and soft, toms y/split)
one set is gated and sent to a VCA
other set isnt and sent to the next VCA
you can then "blend" your drum sound between full bore rock gated/ hard sounding/ short verbs etc to your other open/ soft/ long verb kit.
blend to suit the song>

Hey Gareth, that's very interesting, and a pretty nice setup for live. Do you ever do a channel duplication for the same result using one set of mics? i.e. setup your ungated mics then DI each channel to a 2nd channel and configure them as the gated option?

Drumstruck wrote:

gigpiglet wrote:
<now here is something i used to do with george (cause they went from very very delicate, to full blown rock out)
every drum has 2 mics (kick in and out, snare hard and soft, toms y/split)
one set is gated and sent to a VCA
other set isnt and sent to the next VCA
you can then "blend" your drum sound between full bore rock gated/ hard sounding/ short verbs etc to your other open/ soft/ long verb kit.
blend to suit the song>

Hey Gareth, that's very interesting, and a pretty nice setup for live. Do you ever do a channel duplication for the same result using one set of mics? i.e. setup your ungated mics then DI each channel to a 2nd channel and configure them as the gated option?

hi ian - yes i used to just duplicate the toms.. but usually i found that i wanted not just a gate, but actually a different SOUND (eg the snare, one big fat one with a long lush verb, and one tight snappy gated one)

Other than channel eq and access to a second set of auxes what is the advantage of parrallel gating over use of the range control?

i wouldnt call it parallel gating.
its just having one channel thats gated and one that isnt.
and you can chose one or the other.

you could equally flick "bypass" on 4 gates, and change the reverb FX, and change EQ on all the channels... but you cant do that between verse and chorus right?

its just a matter of speed.

Yeah, sorry I hadn't read your posts correctly....