GoKawiilGated reverb is a technique responsible for the punchy, whip-like drum sounds which dominated popular music throughout the ’80s. Listen to a track like “Kiss” by Prince (1986) and you’ll immediately recognize the sound. It’s bold and quintessentially ‘80s. But what is “gated reverb,” and how was it developed?
When you put a noise gate on a reverb return, the gate’s settings can be adjusted to cut the decay short.
The sound is bright, crisp, punchy, and wet—the antithesis to the very dry drum sounds of the 1970s. As the noise gate closes and “sucks” the reverb’s decay away, you’re left with sharp, reverberated attacks that sit really well in the mix.
So whose idea was it to combine these two processors?
In 1979, engineer Hugh Padgham discovered the technique by accident.
It was while working on Peter Gabriel’s third solo record that the method was born. Without a good deal of happenstance and experimentation, gated reverb’s history would be quite different, had it even been discovered at all!
As the story goes, Gabriel, along with Genesis drummer Phil Collins and engineer Hugh Padgham, were working in Studio 2 at Townhouse, which had a brand new SSL 4000 B console.
The set-up included a talkback microphone in the live room for performers to communicate with the control room, as well as compressors and noise gates on every channel—a first for the era. The talkback mic itself was heavily compressed, designed to pick up even the quietest voices in the furthest corners of the room.
Padgham recalls what happened when he decided to turn talkback on while Collins played:
“The whole thing came through the famous listen mic on the SSL console. The SSL had put this massive compressor on it because the whole idea was to hang one mic in the middle of the studio and hear somebody talking on the other side. And it just so happened that we turned it on one day when Phil [Collins] was playing his drums. And then I had the idea of feeding that back into the console and putting the noise gate on, so when he stopped playing it sucked the big sound of the room into nothing.”
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