Poor mic placement and choice, or a drummer who hits his cymbals harder than the drums themselves, can easily bring the ratio of spill to direct sound to the point where a more traditional drum gate becomes pretty useless. Many gate plug-ins now have advanced features such as frequency-dependent triggering and lookahead, and for the most part, if a drum kit has been well played and well recorded in a decent room, we can very much make it work - as engineers have been doing for many years. Avoiding chatter often means we have to set the threshold lower than we would like, and as a result, we sacrifice the quieter 'ghost notes' that can play a big part in the feel of a live drum part. This can, however, end up being something of a compromise, and the controls on a traditional gate have to be carefully massaged so that we don't get too much 'chatter' as the gate periodically lets through unwanted cymbals and so on. Typically, a modern drum sound might involve gating the close drum mics to eliminate any unwanted spill, before blending them with the overhead or room mics. I've always been a regular user of gates on drums, and have had to learn to accept the limitations of what can, at times, be quite a crude tool. Sonnox's innovative dynamics processor offers unprecedented ability to separate wanted from unwanted audio in drum recordings.
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