Topic: Gated Reverb (Tutorial)

Participant

Hi Everyone, EAReverb 1.3.0 has been recently released and it was a good opportunity to publish a video tutorial about “gated drums”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heYMZ5ocVYg http://www.eareckon.com/pictures/products/YT-EARGTF.jpg You will find some information about the “gated reverb” technique but also some tips about “snap compression”, how to route the multiple outputs of EZDrummer (1 or 2) in the context of Tracktion, … It should be possible to experiment this with your favorite effects (hardware or software). However, this video does not show how to set up a gated reverb (since the tool is now a part of EAReverb). Here is the routing scheme (you will need a gate with a “key input” + a reverb): http://www.eareckon.com/pictures/support/GatedReverb-Routing.jpg http://www.eareckon.com/pictures/support/GatedReverb-Routing-Small.jpg As you can see, the gate processes the “wet” signal (reverb) but it is triggered by the “dry” one. Should you be interested by the story, the “gated drum” sound is known to be a creation of Hugh Padgham who accidentally discovered it while engineering Peter Gabriel’s third album. Phil Collins was playing drums while the (non-muted) “listen mic” of an SSL console was taking the drum room ambience. Hugh Padgham then had the idea to apply a gate to this compressed signal. This genius idea has been used in “Intruder” (the absence of cymbals in the whole thrid album of Peter Gabriel may have been a serious advantage for the use of this technique). Later, the technique has been used in “In the air tonight”, “I don’t care anymore”, “I wish it would rain down”, “Mama”… but also in “Every breath you take” and many other anthological pieces that rocked our teenage years while we were flirting, dismantling Rubik’s Cubes, dreaming to be a drummer or even extracting random binary code to create samples on a C64… and I know that I’m not the only one to be 40 here. Ok, back to this gated drum sound… You can try to use the ambience/room/comp room channels of EZDrummer/Superior instead of a third party reverb (actually, it may be a nice way to learn about ‘bleeding’ issues and how they can be magically resolved in the context of Superior). Oh… and you are absolutely not obliged to compress your snare as heavily as I did in the video in this case 😉 Hope it will help some of you. All the best, P.

Gated Reverb (Tutorial)

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