Mixing drums can seem like some sort of magic. Mysterious, delightful, revelatory, fascinating, confounding, and confusing all at once. My experience begins with the love of playing drums. The power us drummers wield is amazing! We are able to adjust the vibe of a song by leaning in or out, or by playing a little louder or softer; can push and pull the tempo, creating universes of groove and intensity; can simplify something, or add layers of density and complexity, depending on what the music is telling us to do; and can bring the entire band down to simmer during the breakdown by smacking the downbeat, but then almost disappear. Coming from a place of someone who enjoys playing music with others, translating that acumen to recording makes my head spin. One of my first epiphanies at the outset of experimenting with recording myself was that if I hit the drums softer and cranked the microphone preamps, the sound coming back at me through the speakers was far more impactful and exciting than if I insisted on pounding hard. Counterintuitive! Continuing further down the road, I'm learning to use some of the tools engineers and producers rely on to craft the beautiful sounds capable of hijacking our senses. It's like magic, but there's a doorway for those interested and willing to do some work, and there are tools we can learn to utilize.
Okay, that feels like a passionate and flowery preamble to discussing a software gate plug-in. But, the thing is, gates are cool, and the one FabFilter designed works well and is easy to navigate. The first feature worth discussing is how robust the visual the interface is. Loading the plug-in as an insert on a kick drum's microphone track, I can immediately see the obvious notes played as well as the contrasting snare hits bleeding through. Most of the time, making a quick adjustment to the threshold is about all I needed to do to tighten up treatment of the close mic. But there are options: Pro-G comes loaded with six different thoughtful and well-designed algorithms, each optimized for specific tasks gates may have. One could easily be using Pro-G to help shape sounds without ever bothering to click on the Expert tab and utilizing some of the advanced Side Chain functionality, and they'd be doing just fine. I've tuned into a bunch of the instructional content Eric Valentine [Tape Op #45, #133] is making available recently, like making use of a snare track as a key/sidechain to open the gate on a room mic every time the snare plays. This is a powerful technique for chasing sounds, and Pro-G is quite useful for this type of task. Deeper down the rabbit hole, there's an extraordinarily useful EQ section that helps to zero in on and focus the source you're using to activate your gate. Technology! If you begin to feel confused and need to hear your key source for a moment to recalibrate, there's a handy Audition button. Let me make noise about the most powerful feature Pro-G offers; the Lookahead feature option is fabulous. Lookahead lets me retain all the critical attack of my drums by opening the gate ahead of when they are struck. It's new to me, but my understanding is this feature has been poorly implemented heretofore across a number of different products, and FabFilter figured it out. Invariably, we're all going to reach for a gate while mixing at some point, and Pro-G should be your new benchmark.
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