Hey guys, in this video we’re going to cover how to create a gated reverb sound on a snare
drum. As a little background, this is that classic 80s drum sound that you might be familiar
with. What it gives us is a very snappy snare sound followed by a reverb, but the reverb
sound is very controlled. Basically what we’re going to do is create a reverb send for our
snare. Then on that track we’ll add a very long reverb, and cut off the sound quickly
using a noise gate. Before we get started, I’ll turn the reverb send on and off so
you can hear what we’ll achieve in this tutorial.
Alright so for this tutorial we’ll be using Reaper as our digital audio workstation, but
you can do this in any digital audio workstation as long as you have access to a noise gate
that can be controlled through a sidechain. For the audio tracks, I’ve just used a MIDI
drum track, then I’ve routed to separate tracks and recorded them as audio files, that
way it’s more like what you would get when you recorded an acoustic kit. This setup is
a little cleaner than an acoustic recording, since the rest of the kit doesn’t bleed
into our snare track, but you can still do this properly as long as you have a close
mic on the snare. This won’t work properly if you don’t have the snare close miked
though. The first thing we need to do is created a
send. If your software doesn’t support sends, then you can just duplicate your snare track.
We’ll create a new track and name it Reverb. On that track, we go to signal routing and
set the track to 4 track channels. This will allow us to setup sidechain gating.
Now we’ll add two sends to our original snare track. They’ll both be going to the
reverb send. One will be used to create the reverb itself, and the other will be used
to control the gate. We set the first send to the ½ stereo pair, and the second to the
¾ stereo pair. We’ll also set the sends to Pre-Fader, that way if we adjust the level
of the original snare track during mixing later on, it won’t affect the settings for
our gate and reverb. After the sends are setup, we should have
a signal from the snare going to our reverb track, and the original dry snare sound continues
to play on the original track. Next we can work on actually creating the
gated reverb sound. To do this, all you need is a reverb plugin and a noise gate. I’m
using a Focusrite Scarlett Reverb plugin since it sounds a little bit better with this than
the built in plugins, but you can really use any reverb you want as long as it’s a fairly
long reverb. I’m also just using the default noise gate for Reaper.
Let’s solo the Reverb track so we can hear what we’re doing.
First with the reverb, I’ll just adjust the settings. This will affect the sound a
lot, but you can experiment with this and come back later to adjust it. The reverb settings
themselves are not the important part to learn when creating gated reverb. Just make sure
whatever Reverb you’re using is long, and set to 100% wet.
As you can hear, this sounds completely out of control and it will mess up our sound.
What we need to do next is set up the gate so that it can clamp down on those long reverb
tails and clean them up. The first thing we need to do with the gate
is set it up to be controlled by the sidechain. That’s where the ¾ stereo send that we
created earlier comes in. Here we have detector input, which is basically just the signal
that is controlling when the gate is activated. We need to change this to auxiliary input.
This step can change depending on your software, but it’s really important to do this properly.
This way the gate is controlled by the dry snare signal. If we don’t do this, the gate
will be activated by the wet reverb sound. This can create a lot of problems when adjusting
the gate. If we set it up this way, the first thing is that the timing will be off. The
reverb sound is based on reflections so it always spikes slightly later than the dry
signal. Setting our gate around that signal will cause it to come on too late, even with
a short attack, and this can cause it to sound like a double beat. Another problem can be
caused by there not being as sharp of spikes in the volume of the reverb. Then, the reverb
may or may not turn on every time, and sometimes it will turn on when you don’t want it to.
Luckily, setting it up to be controlled by the dry snare sound will completely eliminate
these issues. To adjust the gate, the first thing we have
to do is set the threshold. Put the track on loop, then bring the threshold up to 0.
This will keep the noise gate activated all the time and no sound will go through. Then,
slowly lower the threshold to the point where the noise gate deactivates for every note,
but doesn’t deactivate for other sounds, like if you have other drums bleeding through.
This is completely dependent on the level for your recording, so we can’t say what
a good starting point is. Now we’ll solo the reverb track so that
we just hear the gated reverb without the dry signal. This will make it a little easier
to hear the difference these next controls make without interference.
First is the attack. This controls how quickly the gate deactivates and we hear the reverb
after the snare hit. The gate doesn’t release immediately, unless there’s a very short
attack time. Having it a little longer can create a bit of a swell sound to it.
Release sets how fast the reverb tapers off at the end. I usually leave this at around
400 ms. Below that at 300, it cuts off too sharply. Too long and the reverb sound starts
to get messy. The goal with this is to create a smooth fade out that sounds fairly natural
while keeping it short and in control. The hold controls how quick the reverb will
fade out after the snare hit, and you can adjust it depending on how long you want the
reverb to sound. A good starting point is usually between 100-150ms.
So just adjust these three settings to your liking, and remember to keep switching the
original snare sound back on as you’re doing it to see how it sounds together. Then adjust
the fader to blend the two tracks together nicely. Keep in mind that your goal with the
gate is to control the reverb to the point where it sounds like it’s part of the drum
sound and the listener doesn’t realize that it’s a typical reverb sound.
At the end, you might want to go back and make a few tweaks to how the first reverb
plugin sounds and that can improve the sound. Basically that’s all there is to it when
creating a gated reverb sound. Let’s take a look at what we’ve done here. Here’s
the original track. Thanks for checking out this video on gated
reverb. If you found it helpful, don’t forget to give it a like and subscribe to the channel.
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