| ▲ | In 1979 engineer Hugh Padgham discovered "gated reverb" – by accident(producelikeapro.com) |
| 47 points by bookofjoe 3 days ago | 15 comments |
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| ▲ | Serhii99 an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Working on a real-time audio classifier recently, I keep noticing how the gate-before-processing pattern from this era still rules modern audio ML. Feed silence into a sound classifier and it'll happily hallucinate something — so you put a noise gate on the input, exactly like the trick described here, just used for a different purpose. Counterintuitive thing I learned: when I tried to skip the explicit gate and 'let the model learn it', accuracy dropped meaningfully. The deterministic preprocessing wins over end-to-end here. Kind of an inverse of Padgham's 'accident becomes intent' — the technique survives, just on the analysis side now instead of the production side. |
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| ▲ | aa-jv 22 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I don't know why you were flagged because this is quite relevant to the discussion .. it should be noted that this gated processing technique is quite common and not just for bass/drums - its also used in M/S techniques for recording vocals, acoustic instruments, and so on. I hope you'll train your classifier on different targets of the technique - it seems that would be fruitful, in terms of getting a classifier applied in new ways .. | | |
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| ▲ | OldSchool 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Interesting read, in effect, the live room level defined the envelope of the added reverb in the original discovery at least- I was not aware of this detail. Perhaps much more subtle and useful, (certainly more timeless...) is the technique of gating the bass guitar sound with the envelope of the kick drum, either reducing the volume of the bass guitar on the drum hit, or the dropping its volume except when the kick drum is hit. |
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| ▲ | wartywhoa23 an hour ago | parent [-] | | > the technique of gating the bass guitar sound with the envelope of the kick drum Also known as sidechaining. | | |
| ▲ | aa-jv 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Sidechaining is the technique of gating one channel with the envelope of another - doesn't have to be applied to bass guitar+kick drum - its also popular as a technique in synthesis, such as on a 303 acid line, gated by whichever part of the rythmn track is most relevant to the cause, or in eurorack modular context when one module is gated by another through a side chain signal. It is also highly effective when applied to vocals too. | | |
| ▲ | wartywhoa23 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I agree, there are countless both purely engineering and creative use cases for sidechaining! My absolutely adored kind of sidechaining is spectral, that is, when it's not merely a loudness envelope of a source signal that is driving the gain of a target, but when both are split into FFT bins and the envelope of each bin of the source drives the gain of the corresponding bin in the target. That allows for carving out the target signal with the frequency response of the source, surgically. Works miracles is modern bass-heavy styles. There is one particularily amazing VST plugin at this, but I won't advertize here. |
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| ▲ | obliquely 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Related: the drum sound of Bowie’s Low is similar and similarity iconic/influential. It was created in a different way and predates the Gabriel record, being recorded in 1976. Plenty of geeky details at: https://youtu.be/MbQZx892PHE?si=rs3EhTUAGBkp3eYU |
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| ▲ | krighxz 22 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I just realised Klepacki used this same drum pattern from Sound & Vision with the synthetic noise cymbal on Age of Instinct from the C&C1 soundtrack: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWwoyxHl7X8&ra=m | |
| ▲ | SyneRyder an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | There's also the roomy vocal trick on "Heroes", that Visconti created by using 3 microphones - one close up, one in the middle of the room, and one at the back of the room. The far microphones were gated at different levels though, and only opened when Bowie sang loud enough to open the gate and allow the room mics to be mixed in. Visconti discusses it here, and there's an emulation of the effect in the Eventide T-Verb plugin, using impulse responses of Hansa Studios where it was recorded in the Meistersaal: https://youtu.be/7Q2scPrc1WE?t=737 |
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| ▲ | kleiba2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Here's a 7:38 minutes long video on how gated reverb shaped 80s music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxz6jShW-3E |
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| ▲ | rollulus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This article is incomplete without examples. |
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| ▲ | nubinetwork an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | From TFA: > 1981’s “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins is one of the most famous examples of a gated reverb drum sound. | |
| ▲ | justinator 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Peter Gabriel's solo career w/Phil Collins on drums where he doesn't play cymbals. Listen to, "Melt" |
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