Before I began writing this post I did a quick search on Google for Parallel Gating, to see what other sort of articles were already out there for it and came up with next to nothing, I found this a little strange as I have found it a great little technique to know which was taught to me on a studio course I went on a long time ago and yet seems to be talked about very little.

Recently I showed you how to use Parallel Compression where I compressed a drum beat, ran it in parallel to the original drum beat which effectively gave us the ability to lower the volume of the attack of the drums and comparatively raise the tails of each drum beat up to make the drums have a fuller and tougher tone. Parallel gating effectively allows us to do the opposite by raising the attacks of the drums rather than compressing them.

Parallel gating can be used to get a style of beat where each sound is over with quicker and can be useful for very fast rhythms which have a lot going on as we create more room between each drum hit to fit other sounds in. It can also be used to place subtle effects over a drum beat where you just want to place the effect just on the attack of the sound.

Here again is the same drum beat which I used in the parallel compression post which is a simple reprogramming from a drum loop recorded by bigjoedrummer from freesound, which you can find, download and sample from here under a Creative Commons license.



Firstly place a gate on one of your return channels in your mixer (not as an insert), we want to set it up so we hear just the attack of each sound. Send the drums you want to attenuate the attack of, so send maybe the kick and snare by turning your sends up to 0dB. Set a short attack and a medium release on the gate (see settings below). Then slowly bring down the threshold of the gate to a point where you can just hear the attack of each sound. Here are the settings that I used on my gate in the example in this post. The example below shows just what you can hear through the return channel, notice the attack of the kick and snare are heard only and the tails have been cut off.

• Attack: 0.5ms
• Release: 22ms
• Hold: 5ms

In the player below we have mixed back our original drumbeat with the signal from the return, notice how we have made the attacks of each kick and snare stick out more. This means that comparatively we have lowered the sound of the tails of the kick and snare. If you can't hear a difference, compare it to the first player in this post.



If you can't get a sound which you want, you can always play around with the hold and release on the gate to get different lengths of attacks on the drums, giving different feelings to your drums.

Now for a bit of fun because parallel gating can allow you to come up with some great sounding effects. By placing an effect after the gate in the return channel we can make an effect just affect the attack of the sound. Some good ones to try are reverb, delay, phasers and filters. To give you an idea of what can be created, here is our newly parallel gated drumbeat, but with some delay and an automated band pass filter, giving us a much different effect than putting these on a standard drum beat.



Hopefully this shows a nice way in which gating can be used as an effect rather than just to cut out unwanted sounds and also another technique to add to your production skills to get your drums sounding exactly the way you want them to.