I normally don't listen to contemporary pop - at all. I know, I should. But there is so much dreck to wade through to find that occasional gem, and I'm only in the car for brief periods. Anyhow, I ran across this general-audience explanation of gated reverb and was surprised to hear them state that it's popular again. Groan.
 
What do you think? Is it time to bring this cliché back, is it just nostalgia, or a passing fad?
 

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.

I actually like gated reverb, but as a special effect, not as a standard genre-defining must-have component. Like the Cher Effect, it not only gets tiresome, some day it will make your production sound very dated.
 
OTOH, I'm still waiting for the 808 to die, having confidently predicted its demise in the 90's.

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

808 has been revived by Roland as the TR-08, TB -33 and other boutique versions of the classic hardware reinvented. Still life in the old puppies yet.
 

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
Unless it's me that's the tired old hack.

 
I am afraid so Dave. I had one too back in the day but used it to create percussion parts for electronic music.  I don't think it was ever intended to be a real drum sound but rather something else.  Jarre also used it big time.  That was how it was meant to be used.  Nothing else sounds quite like it in fact. 
 
The cowbell sound also generated a gate signal in unison with the cowbell so you could program that, turn the cowbell down and use a programmed gate signal to trigger an analog sequencer which is what I did all the time. 
 
The fact you could program an entire song was also pretty something at the time too. Someone gave me a TR808 as a gift and I sold it for around $1000! 
 

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 meant TB-03. Going through my older projects, I found something that used Waldorf Microwave XT drum samples. Actually I think I used a quite a bit of them including the bell synthesis. These were from a sample pack alas recorded from the original hardware.
 

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