Q for Charles : advanced kick gate / MILAR

[Olivier le Castor]

Hi Charles,

On the DVD, you trigger a gate with a duplicate of one of the drum kick which is in advance on the timeline ?
Could you clarify why and elaborate a bit please ?
This part was not very clear when I watched it..:Confused:
Thanks in advance,

All the Best,

Olivier

[Brendo]

Have you ever heard of "lookahead"? This is a way of creating lookahead.

It's so the gate opens a fraction before the transient spike of the kick or whatever drum, so that the very start of the waveform is not lost.

[Thumper]

Well, my name isn't Charles.... But I'll give er a shot at answering your question anyway.

It's a way to make sure that you get all of the transient information of the kick. The gate will open BEFORE the kick hits.

You're creating your own "look-ahead" system. Except that the signal isn't delayed at all.

[Thumper]

God damnit Brendo...

[Dion Stewart]

God damnit Brendo...

hehe

[Charles Dye]

I'm not sure if ya guyz need me round here no more. Time to come up w/ more secrets. ;)

Here's what we're gonna do... the post that soundz the most like my answer gets the mod keyz to the forum castle 4 a day.


:muchcoolerpoundinggavelthangs: :muchcoolerpoundinggavelthangs: :muchcoolerpoundinggavelthangs:

[otek]

Well, I am not entirely certain why Charles does it, because I was under the impression the lookahead time was taken into account by the delay compensation in Pro Tools.....

In Logic, it isn't - so in order to get a usable gate on the kick drum without moving the kick in relation to the other drums, this method works very well. You don't wanna move the kick, because it disrupts the phase relationship to the other drums/tracks in the kit (Thumper was kinda hinting at this).

I am not entirely sure why the kick on particular is so hard to gate nicely. My guess would be because it's a big-ass waveform, with comparatively speaking a rather slow "rise time" on the front of it.


Cheers,

otek

[Pimp-X]

Personally, I've never had an issue with gate opening time on kik. Then, I don't use PT either..

It's that lookahead thing I guess. :)

[Nerdyrocker]

If you are running any version of Pro Tools 7.x, the new Digi-Rack Dynamics plug comes with an Expander/Gate that has the lookahead buffer in it. That gate changed my life.

I dont know what Senior Dye is using in the gate department but if it does not have a look ahead, his method is the sure way of not slicing through precious transients.

[Charles Dye]

On the DVD, you trigger a gate with a duplicate of one of the drum kick which is in advance on the timeline ?
Could you clarify why and elaborate a bit please ?
This part was not very clear when I watched it..:Confused:

Hi Olivier,

This question has been answered fairly well by everyone here, but just to throw in my 2 pence...

When using a gate on a kick drum track, with the threshold set so it opens on just the kicks + not the snare bleed, the gate will often produce a loud *click* when it opens. Or with a slower attack it won't click, but it will cut off some of the nice attack sound of the beater hitting the head.

This isn't a good thing.

The solution to this is to use a look ahead gate, but if you don't have a look ahead gate you can use the technique I used in my MiLaR mix.

The purpose of the advanced track is to TRIGGER the gate that is on the Kick Drum buss. IOW, as u know there are 2 kick drum tracks in the mix, a close mic'd + slightly farther mic'd. They are both feeding an Aux Input that I have the kick comp, eq, saturation + gate on.

It is this gate that I am TRIGGERING to open with the "advanced kick drum" (advanced in time about 3 ms) also called the Trigger Kick Drum track. The Trigger Kick Drum is routed to a buss called "BD Trig". So, I have set the C1 gate trigger input to be the "BD Trig" buss.

This means that the advanced BD track will TRIGGER the kick's gate to open just slighty ahead of when the kick plays. This will prevent the *clicks* + allow all of the subtlety of the drummer's attack, where a lot of the dynamics in their kick performance are, to be heard.

Hope this helps.

[Olivier le Castor]

Thanks Charles, that clears my mind.
I do hope you have a follow-up to Milar coming :)
Would you accept to help a bit further ? We're quite isolated here and I was wondering if you would accept to listen to 1 or 2 mixes I recently did and give your opinion ?
I understand you must be on tight schedules but...
Thanks again,
Olivier

[daleandtheguitar]

Hi Olivier,

This question has been answered fairly well by everyone here, but just to throw in my 2 pence...

When using a gate on a kick drum track, with the threshold set so it opens on just the kicks + not the snare bleed, the gate will often produce a loud *click* when it opens. Or with a slower attack it won't click, but it will cut off some of the nice attack sound of the beater hitting the head.

This isn't a good thing.

The solution to this is to use a look ahead gate, but if you don't have a look ahead gate you can use the technique I used in my MiLaR mix.

The purpose of the advanced track is to TRIGGER the gate that is on the Kick Drum buss. IOW, as u know there are 2 kick drum tracks in the mix, a close mic'd + slightly farther mic'd. They are both feeding an Aux Input that I have the kick comp, eq, saturation + gate on.

It is this gate that I am TRIGGERING to open with the "advanced kick drum" (advanced in time about 3 ms) also called the Trigger Kick Drum track. The Trigger Kick Drum is routed to a buss called "BD Trig". So, I have set the C1 gate trigger input to be the "BD Trig" buss.

This means that the advanced BD track will TRIGGER the kick's gate to open just slighty ahead of when the kick plays. This will prevent the *clicks* + allow all of the subtlety of the drummer's attack, where a lot of the dynamics in their kick performance are, to be heard.

Hope this helps.


xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

So to get the Trigger Kick Drum Track, you just copy an existing track and shift it approx. 3 ms earlier and route it, via the buss, to the gate's side trigger?

[Thumper]

Yes.

[Charles Dye]

Yes, as T-man said, that's exactly the way I do it.

Another thing to add, is that I don't gate any of my drums completely. I don't want my drums to sound like samples, all clean + void of some of that bleed that makes a live kit real. IOW, I want the snare to *razz* when the drummer hits the toms or kick; I want the toms to sympathetically *roar* when the snare + kick is played. This is the natural sound of the drum kit.

My goal with the gate is to just increase the dynamic range between the drum hits on each track (i.e. the kick on the kick track, the snare on the snare track, etc.) and the roar of the rest of the kit bleeding in on each of those tracks.

So, what I do is set the gate so it doesn't completely gate each drum, but instead allows some of the natural ambience to poke thru by setting the range of the gate to something like -10 to -20 dB. Usually closer to -10 on the snare, + more like -20 on the kick. This gives the drums separation + punch, but still gives the kit a live sound.

[ryst]

Yeah, I like doing that too. It makes the drums pop a little more when you use the gate as an expander in a way.

What I like to do sometimes if it works for the song is to copy the snare (or kick) to another track in PT or DP and gate the hell out of it or Strip Silence it and then also compress it and then blend it in with the original track. It can add even more pop especially if you only use it for certain parts of the song to add some more dynamics.

I guess it's just another form of parallel comp.

[otek]

On Ryst's note.....

For particularly difficult tracks, where there's a lot of beater-bouncing and low-end artifacts mis-triggering the kick, I find that strip-silencing is also efficient. After I've copied and shifted the track, I tend to strip-silence it unnaturally hard, so that only the initial attack of the kick remains. I then set the amount of hold and release I need to feature the kick's decay.

[Charles Dye]

Very cool, otek.

For troublesome kicks that are mistriggering on snares + other leakage, I will filter the kick trigger track with a LPF @ 180 or lower. And if the very bottom end is rumbling + causing double triggers I might also use a HPF up to 60 or 80 Hz + just leave in the punchie 100 Hz area of the kick to trigger the gate.

Now, @ this point the fact that I'm only using the low end of the kick as the trigger may cause the trigger to open the gate slightly later than w/o the filtering, so I will advance the trigger track another ms or so to get it to open in time.