Sugarite wrote:
Conversely, I record with wide open toms with single ply heads top
and bottom, little or no gating, a small pillow in the kick and 2
overheads, snare and kick mic.

I dislike gating for different reasons - the lack of control and the
distortion to the initial attack. You should try what I do with toms
- manual gating. Isolate each shot in an editor, open just ahead and
fade out however sounds most natural. While the toms are actually
sounding there is no additional processing, so you get precise
control while satisfying your puritan sensibilities. If you've got a
suitable editor it really doesn't take that long once you get the
hang of it. Even if there's 50 shots to isolate in a song I get it
overwith in maybe 1/2 hour tops. It doesn't require your A rig, a
lappie and headphones will suffice, and you can still charge full
wage.


That's what he did on toms, sorry, though kick and snare gating were done by
a processor.

I also have a cute trick for the snare - put a hypercardioid dynamic
under the snare up close to the chain, and while it doesn't sound
good, it gets great isolation on the snare, so use that as the
trigger for a gate on an SM57 above the snare, and pre-delay it a
couple ms to make sure the gate is fully open for the attack.
Similarily, a gate plug-in doesn't affect the sound while it's fully
open.


Cool idea, though what about buzz from the toms etc? I don't mind the sound,
but it does kinda lessen its effectiveness in this situation.

The other problem is that although compression and gating on one channel
works fine, any DAW running on my PC won't run fast enough to reliably use a
sidechain. It'll take about half a second to open the gate. :-)

--
tj hertz