Last night I was experimenting with a tune that I'd recorded a while back, trying to make it sound good. I discovered something that absolutely changed the sound of the entire song and I wish I'd figured it out before. It's just a subtle change, but the impact was huge.

I mic both the top and bottom of my snare drum and record each mic to its own track. The top has a lot more tone and a lot of low frequencies. The bottom pretty much just gets the bright snare sound. The snares tend to buzz a little bit after hitting the drum - like maybe 0.5 seconds after the hit. Plus the snares buzz from the drum picking up vibrations from other drums like the bass drum and toms. The bottom mic picks up all of this extra buzzing, and in the entire mix with all of the instruments it just makes the drums sound like they're playing in a bright room with a bit of reverb. It's a lot of extra mid-high frequency sound that muddles the entire mix.

Enter the gate. For those of you not too familiar with audio processing, a gate is a dynamics tool you can use to limit the sound that is allowed to pass through to the output channel. You can set a gate threshold level, and only sound that reaches above that level is allowed to pass through. So, I put a gate on the bottom snare mic. I prevented the quiter buzzing from passing through, but allowed the louder hits from the main snare notes to pass.

I couldn't believe the sound difference. The bottom was buzzing so much and I didn't even realize it. So now the drums sound super, super clean and the snare is crisp without any after-buzz.

So why didn't I think of this earlier? I don't know. In general I've stayed away from gates because I've had difficulty with them in the past. I've used them while trying to control cymbal bleed-in on the bass drum and top snare mic, but the audio ends up being kinda choppy if the gate isn't set just right, and the cymbals still bleed when the gate is open as you hit the drum. Ick. But the bottom-snare mic doesn't pick up much cymbal bleed naturally, so it worked really well to use a gate.