Talk:Gated reverb

Removed
Removed "by Peter Gabriel, Hugh Padgham and Phil Collins". This needs to be sourced. If someone can add a WP:V source for this it can certainly be added back into the article.--Isotope23 14:15, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Live
"it's hard to reproduce such effect when playing live" Don't you mean "impossible" the whole point is to artificially cut off the reverb. If you're playing drums in a live area the reflections will be audiable to the audiance. You'd have to have the processed drum sound going through a very loud PA to drown out the raw drum sound - which would then feed back through the highly compressed ambience mikes... Not an expert, just into home recording back in the 1980s but I thought it would be worth raising the question so it's thought about Megamanic 02:36, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, yes, you're right. However, it's kind of possible to play "live", while isolating drummer in a separate room and just playing back the processed sound to audience through PA. Whether it should be considered "playing live" or not is debatable, though, so I'd stick to existing phrasing. --GreyCat 09:02, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Maybe that's the reason I've seen drummers on stage in plexiglass boxes. I thought it was purely for sound isolation 'cause you'd not get great reverb inside a small plexiglass box ;) - You'd reckon it would be more practical to close mike the drums & run them through a gated reverb patch at the mixing desk if you absolutely, positively HAVE to sound like Phil Collins Megamanic 02:10, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Misuse of words "analogue" and "digital"
Within the "Methods of creation" part of the article, two different procedures are described as:

""Classic" analogue method"", involving room reverb, that may be natural or artificial as well (consider caves and echo chambers for instance), and

"Modern digital method", that may be succeded through some effect unit, that may be analogue or digital as well (consider a spring reverb device and a digital reverb emulator).

As you see there is a lack of coherence. Please consider a correction of this problem.

LS —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.184.20.170 (talk) 03:39, 10 March 2008 (UTC)


 * The essential difference of these two methods are just how reverberation is applied: naturally or artificially. First is called "analogue" because it clearly requires nothing besides pure analogue recording equipment. Second is called "digital" because it revolves around reverb FX unit - and these units are almost exclusively digital (i.e. involve digital sampling of signal, some sort of delay/processing buffer(s) and mixing of this buffer(s) with dry sound). Usage of "Spring reverb" and other emulation devices, such as echo chambers, etc, fits in 1st method, as they all (AFAIK) require additional mic (and, subsequentially, isolation environemnt). Besides, devices such as "spring reverbs" give a very specific sound and I don't know of any sources that cite applications of these devices for gated reverb. --GreyCat (talk) 18:17, 10 March 2008 (UTC)


 * This stuff sounds like confusion to me. Doepfer produces a module with spring reverb that can be used exactly as a digital unit. You need just one mike, not one close to the snare and one or more for ambience (room sound, I am not sure about the way you call it.) In order to obtain gated reverb you only need to treat the signal within a certain circuit that you create depending on your needs. A classic example of natural reverb used in pop music is David Bowie's recording of Heroes. Read the whole story in the feature classic tracks of soundonsound. I think that the drums played by Lol Tolhurst in the album 17seconds may have received the kind of treatment that I am talking about (I don't think they had any digital algorithms for reverb emulation back in 1980 for such kind of use, but here may I be wrong): they used c-ducer microphones (no spilling, no room sound) and made all of the space and reverb of the drums with effects. You can read it in the article featured in the classic tracks section of soundonsound. I hope that I am not wrong, but you can have mechanical reverb using just one microphone -unless you want to count the ones that are placed INSIDE the mechanical reverb unit.


 * LS —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.190.99.44 (talk) 17:07, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Image copyright problem with Image:Intheairtonight.ogg
The image Image:Intheairtonight.ogg is used in this article under a claim of fair use, but it does not have an adequate explanation for why it meets the requirements for such images when used here. In particular, for each page the image is used on, it must have an explanation linking to that page which explains why it needs to be used on that page. Please check

When?
I don't dispute the drum sound, but is this really its progenitor, or does it have antecedants? I remember a critic quizzing David Bowie in 1977 about the Bowie/Eno snare sound produced on 'Low'. It featured a similar compression and lack of reverb and cymbals.


 * That there is a non-free use rationale on the image's description page for the use in this article.
 * That this article is linked to from the image description page.

This is an automated notice by FairuseBot. For assistance on the image use policy, see Media copyright questions. --03:26, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

The Tubes
Can it be confirmed that the Mondo Bondage snare sound really involves gated reverb? To me it sounds more like reverb through a compressor with an external key, or reverb with a pre-delay. In gated reverb, the &ldquo;tail&rdquo; of a sound cuts off abruptly; here it appears to decay evenly. Lemko. 01:07, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

→ On the talk page of this article more than 3/4 people seems pretty sure that's actually not gated reverb. Maybe it's time to correct on the tubes page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tubes_%28album%29 and forget about it here ? ( I'm don't know rules about wiki sorry just getting into it, so I prefer asking )

83.134.15.89 (talk) 00:22, 30 November 2012 (UTC)


 * 3/4 people on the talk page of which article? Only one person discussed it on this article's talk page before you. Hyacinth (talk) 06:36, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

From "Low" to "Peter Gabriel III"
The article explains that gated reverb was used on parts of Low and then far more thoroughly on Peter Gabriel III... is there any evidence that Robert Fripp may have introduced the technique to Gabriel? He worked extensively with Bowie around the time of Bowie's Berlin trio of albums (most famously on "Heroes"), and also produced Gabriel's second solo album... Grutness...wha?  10:35, 13 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The drum sound on Low may have inspired Padgham/Gabriel/Collins in sonic terms, but it's not really done the same way; Low doesn't exhibit real gated reverb drumming. Different method. - Also, Fripp didn't appear at all on Low and was only in Berlin for a single day to add guitar solos and overdubs on the Heroes album. We can safely rule out that he would have known anything about how the cavernous treated drum sound had been achieved. 83.254.154.164 (talk) 01:45, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

complaint
The "methods of creation" section was tagged in June 2009. I removed the tag, because I think this factual account of the typical process of creation of a gated snare is an effective way to provide a detailed description of the effect. I doubt that the article would be improved if this was expressed by lengthy paragraphs instead. --Avowpost (talk) 02:39, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

What about Yellow Magic Orchestra?
Yellow Magic Orchestra's 1979 track Behind The Mask uses gated reverb on the snare. This seems to beat Peter Gabriel to the punch, doesn't it? Mnealon (talk) 11:49, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

We should describe the non-linear reverb effect
There are two general ways of using a DSP to generate a “gate reverb” effect:


 * Have a noise gate placed after the reverb output (which is described in the article)
 * Use an type of reverb algorithm known as “non-linear”. A non-linear reverb algorithm doesn’t use a noise gate; instead, it puts the sound through a series of delay lines and all pass filters such that the reverb output has a reasonably constant output level then is abruptly cut off.  The amount of time the reverb wash lasts is constant, regardless of the input level of the signal given to the reverb.  Non-linear can also have some decay before the cut off or have the reverb signal level increase in volume before the cut off (“reverse gate” reverb).

There’s some discussion about this over at https://ledgernote.com/columns/studio-recording/types-of-reverb/ in the “Non-Linear” section near the bottom of the article, and we should touch on them here. Samboy (talk) 06:19, 5 April 2021 (UTC)