Looking for a way to tighten up your drum tracks and bring clarity to your mix? Using a gate/expander on tracks like Kick, Snare, and Toms can go a long way to giving you a more focused sound with less unwanted noise. Today’s 5 minute mixing tip covers exactly how to make that happen in your sessions.
For Both Studio And Stage
Something to keep in mind as you watch today’s video. Gates are a great tool both in the studio and in a live setting. Once you learn the concept, you can apply it to more than drums and more than studio situations. If you can control sound on a crowded stage you can really clear up your mix and prevent feedback. Nice!
Comments
Graham, I bought Drums Boot Camp, and on the Gate video I don´t recall that you setup the ratio so high. Is there any advantage with higher ratio?.
Not necessarily. The higher the ratio the more it closes down the gate on the signal.
Absolutely loving this series. Great tips.
Great tip! Should this be used after compression in the chain?
I do it before. That way you don’t compress unwanted microphone bleed.
Once again, awesome
Expanders are also great for noisy tracks, where simply editing out the space between tracks makes it sound too unnatural. An expander turns the noise DOWN without turning it off entirely.
It can be a real life-saver for us home studio folks!
Thanks for explaining the difference between an expander and gate. Now I get it!
We are using Toontracks, ezdrummer and Superior drummer. With these plug-in’s do you think we will need to use any gating, since we can already turn off bleed if we want to within the drum program?
Do you think most of these plug-in’s need to be tweeked, or in general are they already EQ’ed, gated, and mixed pretty well as a default. I know there is a lot of opinion involved, but what is yours.
I love what you are teaching us, I love the music and the message. Thank you for doing this.
Ed
You don’t have to gate it if you have the option of removing the bleed. After all, the purpose of gating is to remove/reduce the bleed. And yes you still need to tweak the eq and compression of the drums so it will really blend or “sit” with your song.