PLEASE HELP! Trying to Gate Noisy Drum Track

Hi folks. I'm trying to clean up a snare track, recorded by a fledgling death metal band that insists they will not use triggered drum samples. Can you help?? I was not present for the recording but I am helping to mix the material. There was one mic on the snare. No matter what I do, I cannot get enough of the bleed from the rest of the kit gated out! Unfortunately, there is a wide dynamic range between the softer and loudest hits, and tons of cymbal leakage. Perhaps it's the gate I'm using, but I can't seem to get the snare hits separated enough, to then compress them and even out the levels. Just when things start to sound usable, I get chatter from the gate. (This is the Sonitus Gate in Sonar 8.5) This is agressive music and I need a snare that at least occasionally punches through the wall of guitars. Yes I know I have major ringing at about 270 and 480-500 to EQ out, and I'll do that first. :) I've tried boosting 3-5K but then I get tons of cymbal noise along with the snare attack that I'm trying to bring out. Boosting the fundamental around 160 doesn't help much and makes the drum sound too tubby. So, do any of you have tricks or procedures to recommend? Or am I hoping for too much here? 320K mp3 of the track is here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/...roblematic%20snare.mp3 Thank you for any help and suggestions, and happy holidays! Chris

Link's not working for me.

I was once faced with a similar scenario, in which the drum track was hopeless but the drummer would have been unhappy with substitution. After hours of tedious automation I finally said f*ck it, I'm putting in a sampled snare. It worked great, everybody was happy with the sound and I looked like a hero. The key to making it work: I didn't tell anybody what I'd done. Just sayin'.

Just a very slightly off-topic question. What's everyone using to do drum replacement. I don't presently have any way of doing it and would like to be able to.

If you're absolutely dead set on not using drum replacement, I'd just go in with a volume envelope and surgically remove, or at least attenuate, the spill & bleed that's present on the snare track

Attenuation might be a better bet - the sudden drop to digital silence might be exactly what the track DOESN'T need - reducing it to 20dB or more below the wanted audio might sound a lot more 'alive'

It'll take a fair amount of time to get it right, but this is quite a common problem so don't baulk at the idea of spending at least an hour on this

What's everyone using to do drum replacement. I don't presently have any way of doing it and would like to be able to.

If you have SONAR, you have everything you need to pull off drum replacement. Tools such as Drumagog are very cool and amazing, but most of the time AudioSnap and any drum synth will do as long as the drums are multi-tracked. Even if all you have is a stereo mix of the drums, you can usually still extract just the kick or just the snare.


Once you have a MIDI track that represents the drum hits, you can route it to any synth or sample player. Session Drummer works fine, and you can even do a lot with the TTS-1. I like to double acoustic drums with various pieces from the TTS-1, in particular the kick.


If you have Kontakt, you have a great many options, including being able to buy individual drum samples for cheap (like 5 bucks each) or download free drum kits (like the excellent Big Mono from Analogue Drums). But even if you don't have Kontakt, these samples are generic wave files that can be played by any sample player, including SONAR's bundled Cyclone.