The sound of gated reverb is identifiable by its unnatural “splat.” When applied to a snare drum, it sounds as though the snare wants to take a long time to decay, but is cut off abruptly. Almost 40 years later, you’re still hearing this effect appear on modern songs like “The Louvre” by Lorde. This processing technique became extremely popular in the 80s, and was used on pop, rock, and funk records at the time. If you’re going for a 1980s vibe, creating a gated reverb effect is a great place to start. You end up with a snare that is extremely reverberant, but also controlled. The gate attenuates the reverberant signal when its level falls below the gate’s threshold most often, the gate completely mutes the recording. This drum processing technique involves applying reverb to a recording, like your snare track, cranking up the decay time and the Dry/Wet knob, and then applying a gate to the output signal. Gated reverb is used to create percussion that sounds massive, without overwhelming your mix. This plugin can be used on sources like guitars and vocals in addition to drums, making it a very versatile tool. Physion lets you to shape transient material, but also do things like adjust the pitch of a drum’s body, while leaving the transient material unaffected the result is highly transparent drum pitch shifting. It allows you to split the transient and tonal elements of a drum recording, process them separately, and then bring them back together again. Transient shapers will play nice with your drum buss because they’re threshold level independent, and capable of processing intricate, dynamic signals.Įventide generously sent me some of their plugins to experiment with recently and Physion (formerly called Fission), which is the first in their line of structural effects plugins, has really stood out to me. By adjusting the Attack and Sustain knobs on Smack Attack, you can quickly modify individual drum tracks, or your entire drum buss. Using a transient shaper is simple you just need to ask yourself if you want your drums to have more punch, or less punch, along with more sustain, or less sustain. There’s also a Wet/Dry knob for parallel processing with having to use an aux track. Some of these features include a real-time graphic wave display, zero latency processing, a limiter/clipper that will allow you to drive your drums, and a sensitivity control that lets you apply selective transient processing.
![snappy snare drum processing snappy snare drum processing](http://www.gretschdrums.com/sites/default/files/drums/snares/full-range-snares/S10814SD-MAH.png)
Smack Attack, which is Waves’ transient shaping tool, contains a number of features not found in other transient shapers. There’s no sustain knob on compressors, but there is on transient shapers this parameter allows you to increase or reduce the level of the signal’s sustain. The attack knob on a transient shaper dictates how much punch transients have, as opposed to the attack knob on a compressor that tells the compressor how long to wait before applying compression. With a transient shaper, you can apply consistent transient processing to a signal, regardless of how dynamic it is.Īnother key difference between compressors and transient shapers is how the controls work. What happens if you’re trying to tame the punch and snap of a dynamic recording, such as the snare track produced by a jazz drummer? This is where transient shapers step in they make it so that the level at which transients peak is irrelevant.
![snappy snare drum processing snappy snare drum processing](https://images.musicstore.de/images/0960/tama-ms20r14s-snappy-snares-14-20-strand-steel_1_DRU0013173-000.jpg)
A compressor can be used to shape the curvature of a signal’s transients, but it will only apply this processing consistently if each transient is of the exact same amplitude. Compressors are threshold level dependent, whereas transient shapers are threshold level independent. Transient ShapingĬompressors and transient shapers are both dynamics processing tools, but there are differences between transient shapers and compressors.
![snappy snare drum processing snappy snare drum processing](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/50/5b/55/505b55b1942ffecd02a50a227fccd53a.png)
![snappy snare drum processing snappy snare drum processing](https://images.musicstore.de/images/1280/fat-cat-fcs12-snappy-snares-12-24-strand-dual-adjustable_1_DRU0018856-000.jpg)
By the end of this guide, you'll have a toolkit of drum mixing techniques that you can rely on to produce results. In many situations, you’ll be sent stems from a client and asked to do your best with them. Recording drums presents its own swath of challenges, but there’s a lot you can do to shape and nurture your percussion after the fact. Drums are like a bull in a China shop if they aren’t treated properly they can destroy your mix.