Apparently, gated reverb is making a comeback

sounds are sounds...
and i can see gated verb on a source that it makes sense.......
but hardly any source in the real world makes sense.
 
then it sounds stupid.
 
that said, i love reverse tracks and reverse reverbs, and anything that creates the spacey ambience that sometimes you just gotta have.
 
 
but to craft a drum sound around gated verb?!
nope.

Maybe one day they'll name an audio engineering quirk after me.
 

I had an actual 808 back in the day. I hated it. "That doesn't sound anything like a bass drum", I thought. But it was affordable and fun to program. Nevertheless, it went into the junk drawer the moment I figured out how to do a believable kick on a synthesizer. And that, in turn, quickly fell by the wayside when I got an Alesis with real sampled drums inside.
 
At no point along that journey did I ever once feel the least bit nostalgic for that boring gated sinewave. So I am mystified as to why young producers of today, with the mindblowing cornucopia of sound available to them, would want to use that tired old hack.
 
Unless it's me that's the tired old hack.

bitflipper
I had an actual 808 back in the day. I hated it. "That doesn't sound anything like a bass drum", I thought. But it was affordable and fun to program. Nevertheless, it went into the junk drawer the moment I figured out how to do a believable kick on a synthesizer. And that, in turn, quickly fell by the wayside when I got an Alesis with real sampled drums inside.
 
At no point along that journey did I ever once feel the least bit nostalgic for that boring gated sinewave. So I am mystified as to why young producers of today, with the mindblowing cornucopia of sound available to them, would want to use that tired old hack.
 
Unless it's me that's the tired old hack.

Ditto.  I absolutely detested that sound during the 80's and none of that has changed.  Everything beautiful about a drum sound taken away.  Add that to their bizarre fetish for deep low snare sounds and it was just a horrible time for acoustic percussion.  Rock drumming was basically a metronome in a cave. To this day I can't stand any music from that era with this percussion sound.  
 
Next you're going to say that the 80's fascination with too much chorus on guitar tracks is going to come back too...ugh.  

I saw that video a few days ago. Its interesting how things are coming back.

Like a lot of these things, they return in cycles. 
 
When I was young, I had a shiny Roland D-50. It was the end of the 80's and New Wave was starting to phase out. Whenever I worked with other musicians, they always begged me for the best piano sound I had. There was this transition and obsession in the 90's where everyone was pursuing a more realistic sound from synths and samplers, forgetting that synths weren't really meant to completely replace acoustic instruments. It was especially crushing to be a keyboard player during the 90's Grunge era. You were relegated to hip-hop and R&B genres to have any kind of relevancy. At some recent point software developed to the point that it can do a pretty convincing job of emulating acoustic instruments to the degree that it is more economical than hiring musicians. Since that frontier is pretty much tapped, things are coming back around again to where pop music is embracing synths as a genuine instrument that isn't trying to be something else. I think it's awesome. We have a lot to be grateful for in this revival.

So now we have other related things like gated reverb making a comeback because they were a huge part of that retro sound. I'm not going to complain about it, it is what it is.

Voda La Void

bitflipper
I had an actual 808 back in the day. I hated it. "That doesn't sound anything like a bass drum", I thought. But it was affordable and fun to program. Nevertheless, it went into the junk drawer the moment I figured out how to do a believable kick on a synthesizer. And that, in turn, quickly fell by the wayside when I got an Alesis with real sampled drums inside.
 
At no point along that journey did I ever once feel the least bit nostalgic for that boring gated sinewave. So I am mystified as to why young producers of today, with the mindblowing cornucopia of sound available to them, would want to use that tired old hack.
 
Unless it's me that's the tired old hack.

Ditto.  I absolutely detested that sound during the 80's and none of that has changed.  Everything beautiful about a drum sound taken away.  Add that to their bizarre fetish for deep low snare sounds and it was just a horrible time for acoustic percussion.  Rock drumming was basically a metronome in a cave. To this day I can't stand any music from that era with this percussion sound.  
 
Next you're going to say that the 80's fascination with too much chorus on guitar tracks is going to come back too...ugh.  

I know what you mean...but I do still love this...
 

A bit of detail from a March 2005 Sound On Sound article:
 
To create that effect authentically, send the drums to a reverb with a medium room preset selected. Now route the output of that reverb through a stereo noise gate (or patch a stereo noise gate into the reverb's return channels) and set an instant attack and pretty much instant release. The gate's hold time can be adjusted to taste, but the threshold should be adjusted carefully to avoid any 'fluttering' during the final part of the reverb tail. For more accurate triggering of the noise gate, take a feed from the drums into the gate's side-chain so that the percussive attack from the drums is used to trigger it, rather than the onset of the reverb alone.
 
https://www.soundonsound....to-set-up-gated-reverb

bitflipper
That's a good tip, using the dry signal to trigger the gate.
 
That thought led me to another: I'll bet you could do some interesting things by triggering the gate off something totally unrelated, like a synthesizer, allowing you to use the synth's ADSR or sequencer (e.g. Zebra's MSEG) to precisely sculpt the reverb's envelope. I think I'm going to try that when I get home (I'm sitting in a hotel room ATM, far from my DAW).

Fascinating idea! Can't wait for your feedback. When you get home. From witness protection, or whatever... 

Pretzels rock.

There is nothing wrong with gated reverb either.  If it is used tastefully within a very new and modern piece of music then it will sound new and modern as well.  A lot depends on what is surrounding the gated reverb at the time.  The gate on the reverb now has a lot of control over how the reverb is perceived too.  I think it is more about the 80's music that was happening at the time.  Keep making music like that and it will always sound like that.
 
With the 808 it was about the sounds too not so much how the sequencer felt for me.  It always felt locked in to the rest of the music very tight when I used it.  Other drum machines had a more definitive feel such as a Linn Drum. I used all the available outputs on the TR808 which allows you to sculpt the sound much better.  Kicks can be turned into huge earth shattering sounds. Hats can be super thin and clean and crisp too.  Effects on certain sounds only.  I had other powerful drum machine sounds happening in unison with 808 sounds for extra power and depth.  I have also done many electronic tracks playing a live fully miced kit alongside 808 drum/percussion parts. They go together well. 

Btw, the kicks on the original hr16 were a pain in the mix. The hr16b did a better job by basically emulating a roland

I'm agnostic about sounds. They're just sounds, after all. When I was engineering in the 80s I had a big plate, not an EMT, but a credible knockoff. Often I would crank it down as tight as it would go, which would make the decay very short, and send the snare to it. I only had 16 tracks, and I knew I would need the plate for mixdown, so I'd return the plate to the snare track and record it that way. I didn't have to use a gate to get that gated effect, and the sound was huge. It sounded less like reverb and more like 50 field snares in perfect unison. Drummers and producers loved it. At some point the pop drum trend drifted toward the "one-mic-20-feet-away" sound, and I had to stop doing that.
 
But I would do it again if I could - I just can't seem to duplicate it with modern electronics.

One interesting sound I've gotten with reverb recently is to send the drums to a short ambience or room reverb, and crank up the predelay to something which sounds like a noticeable note value (like 200ms or the nearest musical value). The decay must be short enough to die out between drum hits. If you shape the tone of it just right (cut the lows and leave some nice high end) it becomes almost like a piece of percussion in itself, filling in the spaces with some nice bright ambience and air. Adds some lovely depth. Wouldn't use it on every track, but as a short "specially effect" to bring in for a few measures, I really like it.