I am hoping parachute pants come 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.

not a fan of that drum sound,
no.
 

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...
 

What do you mean, that sounds like real toy drums you know.
 

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

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).

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... 

Yeh, the heat's died down so they're letting me return home today.
 
Sitting in the world's prettiest crappy airport, waiting for my ride back to the US of A. Been up since 3:00 AM, no coffee yet, half-asleep and questions are rattling in my head...why are there fewer seats in the departure lounge than there are on the plane? Why is ALL foot traffic routed through the perfume store? And what's the deal with perfume sales at airports, anyway? It's the last thing on my mind. Why did security want to examine my shoes today, but didn't care about them on Monday? What would they have done if I'd answered "yes" to the question "have you been to a farm?". I drove past one, I think. I returned the rental car with 3/4 of a tank...now how will I know if they've ripped me off for the gas charges? What is the price of gas here, anyway? I have no idea. 


All will be clear after a nice nap and some pretzels.
 
 

Pretzels rock.