Hey Everyone,
I'm working with a very mediocre drummer and a pretty average sounding set of drums so I'm trying/fighting to my job and guess what?
How fast do you guys set the attack and release on your tom gates and why? Wow, he's getting worse as practice wears on. Please help.
Scott,
Noise gates won't make a drum sound better, it will only require you to listen to it for less time, and (hopefully) one at a time. The "one at a time" feature is quite useful, but requires frequency dependent gating to be effective, otherwise the snare drum may open every gate every few hits with a "very mediocre drummer".
If you want to hear the "stick" sound, attack must be set as short as possible. Less stick, more "head", slow the attack down. Release is generally set shorter for small toms, longer for big toms, and is dependent on the tempo of the song,the genre of the music, and how much reverberation you may want to add (or how much drum you might want to add to the reverb..).
A snappy, tiny tom might only need 50ms to "fit", a big floor tom could need a second (1000ms) or more to "breath".
Experiment.
Art
