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1. Shaping drums with a gate in Cubase

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Noise gates were originally invented to reduce the overall level of noise in multitrack analogue recordings, but they’re still useful in the digital age for, amongst other things, shaping drum sounds. Create an audio track in Cubase and drag Clap.wav onto it. 3

Even at its default settings, the Gate gives us a much more natural sound, fading the tail of the reverb to silence. Let’s get a bit more aggressive with it. Turn the Release level down to 11. This gives us just a short clap sound. Now it’s impossible to tell there was ever a reverb on it in the first place. (Audio: Short clap.wav) 5

Click the empty patch name slot to bring up the list of presets. Select Plate At 4sec and turn REVerance’s Mix level down to 15. This reverb is very intense, so it sounds pretty loud, even at this low level. (Audio: Clap with new reverb.wav) 2

This clap has a lot of reverb on it – in fact, it’s so long that the sample ends before the reverb tail has finished! This clearly won’t do. To fix the issue, click the Insert tab in the Inspector, then the triangular disclosure button on the first slot. Select the Gate effect from the Dynamics folder. 4

You can make the sound even shorter by turning up the Threshold level, if you like. Let’s set it to -14dB. Now we’ve got our shorter clap, there’s nothing to stop us adding our own reverb for a different sonic character. Add REVerence after the Gate effect in the Insert strip. 6

Add another Gate after the reverb, and turn the Release down to 61. Again, this tightens things up, giving us a more usable reverb tail. You can A/B the original and new versions of the clap by clicking the Insert strip’s Bypass button. As you can hear, we’ve completely replaced the character of the original reverb with a different effect. (Audio: Tightened reverb.wav)