From the course: Audio Foundations: Reverb

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Get in the Mix: Gating reverb to emphasize any track in your production

Get in the Mix: Gating reverb to emphasize any track in your production

From the course: Audio Foundations: Reverb

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Get in the Mix: Gating reverb to emphasize any track in your production

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Gated reverb might be one of the least intuitive uses of reverb. Whether it was deliberately invented or sort of accidentally discovered, we'll never know. But whatever its origins, gated reverb is an essential part of music production today. So let's make sure we know how to do it on the all-important snare drum. The signal flow isn't trivial. We run the output of the reverb through a compressor and then a gate to abruptly truncate that compressed reverb so it doesn't last so long. It takes the mess out of our mix. The output of the reverb after compression is itself a long, slowly decaying signal and it would be difficult for the gate to know when to open and close. So we use the key input to open the gate. The close mic on the snare drum feeds this key input by way of a bus, instructing the gate when to open and when to close. But the signal running through the gate, the signal that is in fact being gated is not the snare drum, it's the reverb signal. So compressed reverb passes…

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