The "Gated Reverb" technique in 4 levels of complexity

hey everyone this is oscar from underdog and today i want to talk to you about gated reverbs this is a little sound design music production trick that's been around since the 80s it's also known as the phil collins snare sound but i am not here to teach you a history lesson i just want to teach you how to do it so what we're going to do is we're going to take any sound a dry sound like this and we're going to put this gated reverb on it like this and the whole idea here is that we take a big massive reverb but only play it for a little moment of time so you get this like and then it stops this is different from having just a massive reverb that has a long tail or a short reverb that tails out naturally it goes at full intensity for a while and then stops so now i want to show you in four levels of complexity how to make one of these let's get into it [Applause] [Music] before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel and consider signing up for one of our classes on underdog.brussels or an online music school not just a youtube channel be sure to sign up for the patreon as well if you want to help me make these kind of free videos every single week it's been almost one year now of consistent weekly uploads at the end of august it'll be one year let's keep it coming anyway over to ableton this is level one where we're applying it in the most basic way possible so we've opened up ableton and we're about to get to work the traditional sound to do this on is a snare sound a gated reverb snare is a very very common way to use this phenomenon so let's do that as well let's move into arrangement view in arrangement view i'm going to find myself a drum sample for example a 909 snare so we've zoomed into the timeline and we see here that there's a space of one bar horizontally so we know where we are on the grid and we grab ourselves a snare drum and we put it on every back beat so there we go and there we go so let's listen to that okay pretty standard snare sound right now let's put a massive reverb on there that's the main ingredient right a massive reverb so we go to ableton's audio effects put a massive reverb on there reverb with a huge decay time okay now this sounds massive sounds absolutely like it's in some kind of church cathedral hall so let's do the next step which is to gate that reverb so it stops at a certain point now traditionally you would take yourself a gate put it on there and then set the threshold of the gate so that at a certain point once the volume of the of the reverb dips below it it just cuts off let's find the sweet spot there we go most of the hits work pretty well right however you see that once the volume goes under a certain level it kind of get this fluttering effect for this we're going to need to go to level two of our sound design which is to not trigger the gate with the audio that's just coming in with this reverb signal but trigger it with the dry signal before the reverb hits so if this sounds confusing remember what a gate does a gate it listens to an audio signal and when the signal is below a certain level it mutes it it goes it pushes it down really far and once the signal goes over the level it lets it through that's what a gate is doing fundamentally and if you recall in the transgate video a few weeks ago we use a technique called side chaining the gate and that just means that instead of the gate listening to the signal that's passing through it it checks a different signal for volume and if that other signal is loud enough then it lets through the audio on this channel so what we want is we want this gate to be triggered by the dry drum sound not the reverbed drum sound because that's causing this fluttering effect so on ableton all you have to do is open up the sidechain controls here hit side chain select audio input from the track that we're working on right now which is the snare drum and then down here you can see it says pre fx this means that it's now listening to the signal before any effects are applied to it so you'll see in the little diagram over here just the shape of a dry snare drum not this big reverb snare let me show you that now so you see here every time the snare hits the entire signal is coming through so let's put some hole down there [Music] perfect and so with this now we have a lot more accurate control because the transient of the snare is triggering the gate the gate then has a hold amount and then that's basically the envelope is very determined it's not going to start fluttering like it did in the other example so this is the basic gated snare that you can get away with just like this you could probably do your entire production career just with this level of complexity but i want to show you two more levels of complexity that might give you even more control over the sound design of your elements the first thing i want to do is i want all of this i want this special effect i want it to be in parallel the great thing about having effects in parallel means that you have control over how loud the dry signal is and how loud the reverb signal is and you can take away the reverb signal or give it back and you're not going to affect the dry sound this gives you a lot more versatility than a dry wet knob and it's super easy to set up in ableton all you have to do is select these two effects and hit command g or control g or hit group here in the menu and what that does is it creates an effect track around it now effect racks are a great way in ableton to do parallel processing what it does is an effect track it takes audio that comes into it and splits it up into a number of chains and each chain includes an identical copy of the sound you can process all these copies differently and at the end of the effect track they'll get added back together with each other so to really see this in action we have to go to this little dot here on the bottom left and open up the chains here and so as you can see there is only one chain right now so we're going to right click and create a new chain and this new chain you can see when we select it there are no audio effects in there that means it's a dry chain we're just letting the audio through completely unprocessed let's give it a name for that it's the dry chain then this other chain that's where all our special effects are going to be and we want those to be 100 wet we don't want the dry signal coming through here as well so here we set the dry wet to 100 so now when we play everything we're going to get more or less a similar result so a very powerful and big hit that still sounds massive but also doesn't clutter our mix with unnecessary reverb tails that's the real beauty of this and now that we've got control over this exact chain we can set the volume of this chain differently for instance let's automate it so you can right click here on the volume for this chain let's give it a name as well it's the verb chain you right click there and you do show automation in a new lane i like to always show automations in new lanes because then you always have a visual overview of what you have automated there's no secret parameters changing in the background that's just a workflow tip now here i would do control b to get this little pencil and then i would draw in my automation so down here we'll go to minus infinity and then here let it be loud for instance so there you go now we suddenly have control over the volume of this element and we can spice up individual hits with this new dimension of sound and now for the fourth level of complexity is that you can shape the character of this reverb quite drastically now that you have so much control over it you can do almost anything to it because you can affect the sound in such a crazy way eventually it's going to get cut away anyway and into this nice little manageable thing right behind your snare for example we can put some very big moving effects on there like a frequency shifter we can saturate it we can put any number of creative effects on there to color the tail of this reverb another cool trick is to also experiment with longer attack times to create like a swell or a breathing in kind of a feeling let me show you what that could look like and of course you might have to change the volume of this to compensate for some of the madness that you're interjecting so all you got to do is put a utility on the end and just mess with the gain there because of course you've automated this other slider so it's no longer very useful to start moving that around one or two decibels that's a bit exhausting and now with these four levels of sound design let me construct a real quick beat around it just so you can feel it a little bit more in action and you don't just see this naked sound like this let's do that now [Music] and so here we go this is just a little micro composition to prove the point that if you've got yourself a gated snare like this you get some more interest in the beats and then also this piano also has a gated reverb on it which creates this kind of rhythmical pulling and pulling on it because if i turn that off [Music] that's what it would be just straight up house piano with no no real movement and rhythm in it now here's this thing that pulls and pushes in an interesting way then all we have to do is later in with some beats [Music] some bass and an arpeggio because that's always kind of nice [Music] and voila there you have it this project will also be downloadable from the patreon in the next few days i hope you can use gated reverbs as a little bit of a secret weapon a little bit of a sound design tool to give nuance and subtlety to your productions come say hi on our discord channel to tell us what you did with this effect check out one of the other music production videos right here in the meantime be good to one another stay producing take care and bye

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 22,188

Rating: 4.9840455 out of 5

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Id: TvI2ZBAXRBE

Length: 11min 6sec (666 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021