alt.hn

5/17/2026 at 4:00:48 PM

In 1979 engineer Hugh Padgham discovered "gated reverb" – by accident

 https://producelikeapro.com/blog/how-one-recording-mistake-created-a-musical-phenomenon-in-the-80s/

by bookofjoe

5/20/2026 at 12:33:15 PM

For those with Apple TV+ subscriptions, I’d recommend Watch the Sound with Mark Ronson, a six-episode series which explores different technologies used in music production.

Episode 3 covers reverb and delves into its history and how it’s implemented using modern digital technology. The presenter gets to visit the famous reverb chambers in Capitol studios – and then a room that was designed and built to have no reverberation whatsoever. He also visits the disused underground oil storage tanks at Inchindown, Scotland which holds the record for having the longest reverberation time for a man-made structure¹.

The episode also features Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” which was cited in the featured article as an example of a gated reverb drum sound (I don’t think Ronson mentioned that this effect was created by combining reverb with a noise gate).

¹ https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/now-we-ve-heard-it-all-ac...

by Anthony-G

5/20/2026 at 1:25:09 PM

Thank you for the Watch the Sound recco, looks great.

by brookst

5/20/2026 at 12:50:42 PM

I heard this story at a trade school for studio recording. Recording urban legend validated. Here's another that I've found vastly interesting:

On the Fleetwod Mac song Dreams, they had two mics on the snare drum. One was on the top, the other was on the bottom, where the "snares" are (these are small metal chains that rattle, at least in my experience; other materials may be used?). The song only opens / turns on the lower mic during the chorus, making the drum slightly more present but also boxier. It's a really subtle technique to add movement to the changes and it blew my mind when I learned about it. Studio magic is a thing.

The 80s were a really interesting time in music. I feel like everything became even more formulaic due to MTV. Everything sort of converged in a way that was more pointed than before or since. Maybe that's just me due to when I grew up. After all, it also gave rise to hip hop and rap (I know, Motown came before that). That wasn't part of the monoculture.

by alsetmusic

5/20/2026 at 7:18:02 AM

Here's a 7:38 minutes long video on how gated reverb shaped 80s music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxz6jShW-3E

by kleiba2

5/20/2026 at 10:39:57 AM

Thanks, the article written in 2020 (?) is essentially a 1 to 1 copy of the vox clip "How a recording-studio mishap shaped '80s music" from 2017. (If the chronology is right)

kind of useless if the well produced vid delivers all the examples you can actually listen to ...

by dav_Oz

5/20/2026 at 6:04:41 AM

Interesting read, in effect, the live room level defined the envelope of the added reverb in the original discovery at least- I was not aware of this detail.

Perhaps much more subtle and useful, (certainly more timeless...) is the technique of gating the bass guitar sound with the envelope of the kick drum, either reducing the volume of the bass guitar on the drum hit, or the dropping its volume except when the kick drum is hit.

by OldSchool

5/20/2026 at 8:44:01 AM

> the technique of gating the bass guitar sound with the envelope of the kick drum

Also known as sidechaining.

by wartywhoa23

5/20/2026 at 9:44:08 AM

Sidechaining is the technique of gating one channel with the envelope of another - doesn't have to be applied to bass guitar+kick drum - its also popular as a technique in synthesis, such as on a 303 acid line, gated by whichever part of the rythmn track is most relevant to the cause, or in eurorack modular context when one module is gated by another through a side chain signal. It is also highly effective when applied to vocals too.

by aa-jv

5/20/2026 at 9:58:59 AM

I agree, there are countless both purely engineering and creative use cases for sidechaining!

My absolutely adored kind of sidechaining is spectral, that is, when it's not merely a loudness envelope of a source that drives the gain of a target, but when both are split into FFT bins and the envelope of each bin of the source drives the gain of the corresponding bin in the target.

That allows for carving out the target signal with the frequency response of the source, surgically. Works miracles is modern bass-heavy styles, along with spectral limiting.

There is one particularly amazing VST plugin at this, but I won't advertise here.

by wartywhoa23

5/20/2026 at 11:44:12 AM

You won't advertise? Please do.

by xanderlewis

5/20/2026 at 12:12:24 PM

Alright, it's Melda MSpectralDynamics.

But before anyone blames me for advertising a commercial product, I'll balance this out with an open source alternative: Nih-Plug Spectral Compressor.

by wartywhoa23

5/20/2026 at 11:57:24 AM

Possibly referring to the Trackspacer VST plugin

by krighxz

5/20/2026 at 12:47:18 PM

My inherent pedantry drives me to say "this sounds like compression, not gating". Do lots of people use "gating" to mean "automated volume control"? In 30ish years of hobbyist music production I have only encountered it to mean "automated in/out control". It's "compression" that automates dynamics.

Thinking out load a bit here:

- maybe the existence of West-coast style "low pass gates" proves me wrong...

- gates sometimes have release controls, which would make them "automated volume control", but I still contend that aiming for zero gain when the gate closes makes them in/out controls not "dynamics" controls).

by the_other

5/20/2026 at 10:25:21 AM

ExpanderGate on input and gate after reverb is what enabled 80's drum recording and mixing to reach new heights. Real drums sounding like rhythm machines, without the sterile artifacts that a typical rhythm machine brings. Solid State Logic was a big enabler here as, if I recall correctly, they were the first to put expander/gate on each and every mixer channel, right next to the equalizer.

by atmanactive

5/20/2026 at 7:53:41 AM

Related: the drum sound of Bowie’s Low is similar and similarity iconic/influential. It was created in a different way and predates the Gabriel record, being recorded in 1976. Plenty of geeky details at: https://youtu.be/MbQZx892PHE?si=rs3EhTUAGBkp3eYU

by obliquely

5/20/2026 at 8:58:37 AM

There's also the roomy vocal trick on "Heroes", that Visconti created by using 3 microphones - one close up, one in the middle of the room, and one at the back of the room. The far microphones were gated at different levels though, and only opened when Bowie sang loud enough to open the gate and allow the room mics to be mixed in. Visconti discusses it here, and there's an emulation of the effect in the Eventide T-Verb plugin, using impulse responses of Hansa Studios where it was recorded in the Meistersaal:

https://youtu.be/7Q2scPrc1WE?t=737

by SyneRyder

5/20/2026 at 9:46:56 AM

I just realised Klepacki used this same drum pattern from Sound & Vision with the synthetic noise cymbal on Age of Instinct from the C&C1 soundtrack: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tWwoyxHl7X8&ra=m

by krighxz

5/20/2026 at 9:17:00 AM

Working on a real-time audio classifier recently, I keep noticing how the gate-before-processing pattern from this era still rules modern audio ML. Feed silence into a sound classifier and it'll happily hallucinate something — so you put a noise gate on the input, exactly like the trick described here, just used for a different purpose.

Counterintuitive thing I learned: when I tried to skip the explicit gate and 'let the model learn it', accuracy dropped meaningfully. The deterministic preprocessing wins over end-to-end here. Kind of an inverse of Padgham's 'accident becomes intent' — the technique survives, just on the analysis side now instead of the production side.

by Serhii99

5/20/2026 at 9:46:46 AM

I don't know why you were flagged because this is quite relevant to the discussion .. it should be noted that this gated processing technique is quite common and not just for bass/drums - its also used in M/S techniques for recording vocals, acoustic instruments, and so on. I hope you'll train your classifier on different targets of the technique - it seems that would be fruitful, in terms of getting a classifier applied in new ways ..

by aa-jv

5/20/2026 at 9:55:22 AM

It’s a bot unfortunately (creation date + other comments + LLM tells)

by armchairhacker

5/20/2026 at 9:29:22 PM

X wins over Y

X rules Y

meaningfully

X just Y instead of Z

by tedd4u

5/20/2026 at 9:54:45 AM

Probably because comparing apples to oranges.

by gizajob

5/20/2026 at 1:10:47 PM

This article is plagiarized from the Wikipedia article on gated reverb. I went to Wikipedia to find an example of the sound (because, of course, this article about a sound effect doesn't include an example, another example of shitty writing) and saw at least one paragraph in the summary had been lifted verbatim.

by moron4hire

5/20/2026 at 2:26:40 PM

It would be good to hear examples of this effect, alright. I’d like to hear how something sounds with 1) no reverb, 2) with reverb applied and 3) with the reverb gated.

The Wikipedia article goes deeper into the history; the featured article has no mention of Steve Lillywhite and others who were using similar techniques before Hugh Padgham worked on Peter Gabriel’s third album. It also has a good explanation of the three different ways of creating this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gated_reverb

by Anthony-G

5/20/2026 at 8:04:31 AM

This article is incomplete without examples.

by rollulus

5/20/2026 at 8:10:01 AM

Peter Gabriel's solo career w/Phil Collins on drums where he doesn't play cymbals. Listen to, "Melt"

by justinator

5/20/2026 at 9:23:42 AM

From TFA:

> 1981’s “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins is one of the most famous examples of a gated reverb drum sound.

by nubinetwork

5/20/2026 at 12:15:38 PM

[dead]

by gwei

5/20/2026 at 8:47:05 AM

[dead]

by unit490