Gated reverb

Gated reverb is an audio processing technique that is applied to recordings of drums (or live sound reinforcement of drums in a PA system) to make the drums sound powerful and "punchy," while keeping the overall mix clean and transparent-sounding. The gated reverb effect, which was most popular in the 1980s, is made using a combination of strong reverb and a noise gate.

Unlike many reverberation or delay effects, the gated reverb effect does not try to emulate any kind of reverb that occurs in nature.

The gated reverb effect became highly popular as part of the strongly syncopated sound of 1980s pop, rock and funk. Two early and prominent uses of the effect were associated with Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and Hugh Padgham: first in the production of the third Peter Gabriel solo album (with drumming on a few tracks by Collins and engineering by Padgham), notably the opening track "Intruder", and half a year later on Collins' hit single "In the Air Tonight", produced by Collins and Padgham.

The oldest, most "natural" technique can be executed with minimal electronic processing. The steps for processing are as follow:

This results in a very live-sounding drum that is rapidly cut off with none of the overpowering secondary reflections associated with reverb. Note that this process is generally used in studio recording environment only: it's hard to reproduce such effect when playing live, though both Phil Collins and Genesis were able to incorporate it into most of their live performances.

When using a hardware reverb unit, echo chamber or digital emulation of either, it is possible to replicate the classic scheme:

Such a setup does not require a "live room" with huge reverberation ambience for the drum set and can be reproduced without major difficulties at live gigs.

Gated reverb is most commonly used for empowering drum sounds, particularly snare drum and bass drum. The technique became so popular and the "gated reverb" sound is so recognizable that many drum machines and samplers include some sort of "gated drums" setting. These sounds are usually referred to as gated snare and gated kick, omitting the word "reverb" from the original name.

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