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

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

This article is incomplete without examples.

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