Staying with my non-MIDI example of a multitrack recording for the moment, you may find that the bass drum you recorded didn't really have the depth of sound or produce the degree of satisfaction you were looking for. You could, by other means, replace the bass drum with a triggered sample, but then you'd lose the natural sound and the subtlety of real drumming (and even after all these years of MIDI, good drummers are still worth their weight in gold). Another solution is to find a low-frequency sine wave from somewhere - from your console's oscillator, your Akai S1000 or synthesizer - and patch it to the gate's input. Route the real bass drum to the key input (while still including it in the mix) and carry out the external triggering procedure as before. Now you'll get the bass drum plus a low-frequency pulse to mix in to provide all the beef you need. You'll probably want to experiment with the frequency of the sine wave (don't blow your speakers!) and with the Attack, Hold and Decay of the gate, so that the addition of the sine wave isn't too obvious.

And Finally Just to finish off, let's take a look at that good old standby - gated reverb. Nowadays, we invariably use the gated reverb preset on our trusty multi-effects units, but sometimes the traditional ways are still best. The easy way to produce real gated reverb would be to apply the signal plus reverb to the gate's input and use internal triggering, ignoring the key input. With the DS201 however, this limits the settings of the Hold control available to you, since you'll sometimes get jitter. A better way is to feed the dry signal to the key input and the dry signal plus reverb - or even the reverb only - to the normal input. In this way you have full control over the gating, and you can get a very wide range of reverb envelopes, which are normally not available with multi-effects units. You can also use this technique with real reverb - if your bathroom or stairwell is big enough. There is a wonderful world of sounds available to the person willing to experiment with the Drawmer DS201, and even if you're the owner of a different type of gate, many of the techniques discussed still apply.

Vital for Vocals A clever use of the DS201's external triggering via the Key input (see 'Further Adventures' section in the main text) is making particular parts start and finish at the same time. It's common with backing vocals, once you start layering them up, that the starts and ends of the lines can get messy - perhaps some start a fraction early, some end a fraction late. To deal with this, mix the whole lot into a subgroup (or two for stereo) and send it through the gate. Use the backing vocal with the best timing as the trigger for the gate and you'll find that the whole thing has tightened up considerably. This technique won't do anything for discrepancies in timing during the line, but the start and finish are really the most important things to get right.

The Secret of their Success? This article is centered around the Drawmer DS201, which, as mentioned at the start, is almost a studio standard. But what's the reason for Drawmer's success? Is it that their gate is better than everyone else's? The DS201 is certainly very good, and reassuringly predictable in operation, but I don't think that's the sole reason, as there are good gates around from other manufacturers. I'd say that the principal reason for Drawmer's success is that they brought out the DS201 at a time when noise gates were thin on the ground, and most importantly, they sold it at the right price. I have heard comment in industry circles to the effect that Drawmer could have charged more and still had a success on their hands. One thing is certain; Drawmer set the pattern for how a noise gate should perform and how much it should cost.

Factory Sound Note We stumbled upon this article whilst playing the ‘Drawmer’ website. It first appeared printed in the UK mag ‘Sound on Sound’ in 1996. The good people at Drawmer (yes, it’s still a family company and our contact’s last name is Drawmer) gave us permission to plonk David Mellor’s well-written article on our own website.