Gating to tape

Tape a small contact mic to the rim of the drum. Use the signal from this to feed the key link of a fast gate. By the time the sound reaches the main mic the gate should be open. I've seen this used to great effect on snares, where the goal has been to get the snare mic a bit further away than usual without getting to much spill.

Another use for the contact mic is to key link it to a ducking gate across the hi hat mic. No snare in the hat mic. If either of these thing seem like good ideas but not on the way to tape, just record the contact mic and set the gates up for the mix. The above two tricks were taught to me by Michael Stavrou flux@sydney.dailix.oz.au Another gating trick is to gate a sloppy bass with a key link from the kick track. Tightens that right up. (Not that I've heard it actualy work well).

And lastly a choppy artificial sound can be created by gating the guitar track with a keylink from the hats. If you feed the keylink from a bus which has the hats and a tone, you can overide the effect with the mute switch on the tone channel. This works well with dance tracks with real guitar, for bursts of timed, cut up guitar squeals.

Dave Newman is second engineer at MARS Kings Cross Sydney Australia.
decay@dot.net.au
http://www.dot.net.au/~decay

PoBox1195
Potts Point
Sydney Australia
NSW 2011