How to effectively use Gating / De-essing

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As far as gating and de-essing goes, I have heard about these tools and fx and what not but Ive never really fiddled with them. Nor do I ever really hear much about anyone using them.

When mixing / mastering EDM, like heavy dubstep or even minimal house, do people typically use gating or de-essing?.. I can see gating being used as an effect on a synth or white noise sure, but idk what else it would be used for?... And De-essing I would at least assume thats used primarily for vocals?.. But how would you apply that for mastering? or is that not even remotely necessary?..

Just looking at those fab filter plugins, seeing if I can find use in them, or if its even wise to get them for the kind of music I make.

Any input is appreciated!

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Gating is mostly associated with "80s snare sound": snare>gigantic reverb>gater.

There are different approaches, for example I'm using drawable volume envelope in Fruity Convolver to gate reverb, instead of using a traditional way: source>gigantic reverb>gater. It looks like this (I'm using a white noise sample):
Image

The main difference is that with this approach you can fine adjust the effect.
If you do things in a traditional way, things can get messy easily, especially with drum fills and that's why people adjust everything and then export samples, then import them and use them so that things don't fall apart somewhere in the track.
Also, another huge difference when I gate something with Fruity Convolver is that you don't require big transients like when doing things in traditional way (so that gater can work properly), but you can apply gated reverb to pad, lead, vocals and to fatten up the sound.
So, it sounds like this:

https://soundcloud.com/brainzistor/char ... ted-reverb

You can hear that the sound becomes fatter, you are using reverb to fatten up the sound, but at the same it's not a traditional reverb sound that will give you the sense of space because there's no tail, it ends where the note ends.

I was talking about Fruity Convolver, but any reverb that has drawable envelopes can do the same thing.

Gating is also used A LOT when recording guitars with distortion because distorted guitar's waveform is like this: |||||||||||||||||||||
and then when you have a lot of gain and need a full stop, gater will cut down lower volumes, so things are done automatically instead of manually, to remove all "artifacts" in pauses, like scratching of strings, buzz from amp, whatever.


De-essing. Besides using it for vocals, de-essing is used to remove harsh frequencies from crash cymbals.
I used it a lot while I was working with Addictive Drums because its crash cymbals are horrendously harsh.

When it comes to mastering, mastering is done with EQ, compressor and limiter.
If there are problems, you go back to mixing and fixing issues there, you are not supposed to fix things in mastering stage. You don't insert de-esser on master bus to fix problematic sibilants in vocals or harsh crash cymbals or whatever. All of that stuff should be fixed while you are mixing the song or track.
When you are in mastering stage, you are not supposed to fix anything, if something stinks, go back to mixing. It's that simple. The sooner you distinguish both processes and draw a line between these two, which is very hard in the beginning, the sooner you'll become a better producer.

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Well dang! Thank you for the very detailed response..

I appreciate all this info.. seriously you rock!
I would always use slight eq curves to reduce the harshness in elements.
Definitely will be fiddling with this in my mixes.

Luckily I am an FL user so maybe I can take advantage of the Fruity Convolver.


Again thank you! :)
literally left me with no questions.

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brainzistor wrote:Gating is mostly associated with "80s snare sound": snare>gigantic reverb>gater.

There are different approaches, for example I'm using drawable volume envelope in Fruity Convolver to gate reverb, instead of using a traditional way: source>gigantic reverb>gater. It looks like this (I'm using a white noise sample):
Image

*Update*

After reading your response I was messing around with using fruity Convolver on heavy bass and hot damn I was able to do some really cool tricks that no other reverb plugin really offeres. At least that Ive seen / noticed.
With that volume envelope it really cleaned it up, messing with the time stretch settings gave the dry signal its impact/sound and the reverb hit came right after. REALLY REALLY sick effect.... Ill be having plenty of fun with this.
THANK YOU

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