It's this one:
In Mike's defense, in the Drum magazine article he stated that he had to hit as hard as possible on everything in order for the gates to capture the notes. That tells me they heavily gated the drums. For anyone who doesn't know sound engineering, they open and close when a note is hit in order to keep any unwanted background noise out. I wonder if they did this because they were writing and tracking simultaneously all in the room. You can tell the toms and snare were heavily gated. The issue with gating is if you don't hit everything very loud, the note may be completely lost since the gate would not open thinking it was background bleed verus an intentional hit.
I don't think it is posted online but it is the 2013 Drum! issue with Mangini on the cover. Yes they even captured some fills/parts that ended up on the final album from while they were all playing together. Funny thing about DT12 though is there aren't a whole lot of dynamic parts in the songs during sections with drums. Almost every part that has drums is very big sounding and in your face.
which, indeed, is not available to read on the interblag (that I can find). You can buy it on the Drum! store, but I was kinda hoping someone around here who loves Mangini with all their heart and soul would perhaps have the issue and be able to quote directly his words on the subject. I'm certainly very interested in what was really said, rather than the second hand information (that is hopefully accurate).
I'm not calling that guy wrong, because (1) I don't know him and don't know where he got his information; and (2) I obviously have not been present when DT has been recording. But that said, I think he is off base. Based on how I understand noise gates and how they work, his explanation doesn't make sense. When you gate drums, think of it as a physical gate that opens and closes to let sound into the microphone. When the gate is open, sound comes in. When it is closed, sound does not. When the drum or cymbal is hit, the gate opens and closes quickly, letting in the sound of the initial drum hit, and closing so that you do not get the reverberation and decay, which makes the hits sound relatively identical. But the gate can't pick and choose what sound it lets in. It merely opens and closes. Now, you might have the microphone sensitivity set really low so that it picks up a minimum of background noise. And you might have the gate sensitivity similarly set so that only a drum hit, and not background noise, opens the gate. But still, when the gate is open, it is open, and the mic will pick up whatever it picks up. Whatever the mic picks up when the gate is open is a function of the mic sensitivity, not the gating.
Mic sensitivity is mic sensitivity. You set the input level and that's that. It isn't a variable adjustment sort of thing. Only the threshold (sensitivity) of the gate is movable (and the player's velocity choice). Mic level can be adjusted afterward, of course, which is why compressors exist, and fader automation, and all that.
The whole point here is that Mangini purposely didn't play ghost notes on the snare because they wouldn't get through the gate. And whether the hard snare hits were sample replaced (my original post in this thread) or not, at the bare minimum he certainly attempted to make it sound that way because of the gating decision, and it's part of why his drum sound on DT12 is awful and unnatural. Samples or not, his kit sounds remarkably similar velocitywise to the triggered I&W drums.
So given this whole thing, I have no idea why ghost notes suddenly appear in Behind the Veil, though. Clearly they either decided one groove was allowed ghost notes on the snare or someone somewhere has confused the gate discussion with the moving-of-ghost-notes-to-other-kit-pieces discussion. This is primarily why I hoped someone had access to this elusive article and we could therefore see what Mangini actually said about it.
Topic: Perfect sound of bass drum (Read 2182 times)