giwake

game developer, I think?

  • they/them

i make games and music, sometimes.

profile picture by @thewaether!!!

moving to https://bsky.app/profile/giwake.bsky.social


YuushaRuby
@YuushaRuby

It’s crazy how Phil Collins changed music FOREVER with something so simple it’s asinine

If you’ve been producing music in any serious capacity for some time you’ve probably heard of “the phil collins snare”

Otherwise let me tell you about it

basically in the 80s Phil Collins was fucking around in the studio after his divorce and was just trying shit and improvising which resulted in “in the air tonight”

But the SNARE on that track was the talk of the fucking town and everyone in the pop world was like what the hell how do you do that you mad man, anyway, we’ve known for a long time now how the sound is achieved and it’s cool, it’s a neat little thing, gated reverb

So a “gate” is an audio processing unit that is exactly how it sounds, it’s a gate, but I’ll explain further, with a gate unit you have a threshold slider, anything below the threshold value gets “shut out” basically, you know, like a gate, simple, it was originally intended to remove the noise floor of other audio equipment like synthesizers, microphones, etc. but Phil Collins again was fucking around and decided to try employing it creatively, and used it on stuff that was run through a reverberation unit, a fancy machine that makes things sound like they exist in a physical space other than where they were recorded, or in some cases more like where they were recorded, and often, spaces that do not exist and will never exist, it simulates the reflections of information about a hypothetical space a sound is made in, it’s cool, you’ve probably heard it used countless times in media, I recommend searching like “reverb unit demo” on YouTube if you’re truly unfamiliar with the concept, I love reverb!

Anyway, employing a gate on a sound soaked in reverb turned out to make pretty cool results, you basically get all this crazy information for the length of the drum sample but then it just cuts off dramatically, making it sound fucking huge and boisterous, it’s an incredible effect and it’s been employed in countless records since and I don’t think it will ever go away, knowingly or not, lots of drum sample packs people pick up have snares that have gone through a gated reverb chain for instance, and people use those without knowing about how the sound was made, which is cool, you don’t gotta a know everything, just making the point the sound will live on!

Anyway, we can thank Phil Collins processing emotional grief for one of the most iconic sounds in music history, in effect

Dudes rock


Links to examples

https://youtube.com/watch?v=N6L_BG0Qhg0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TvI2ZBAXRBE https://youtu.be/YkADj0TPrJA

Edit: according to @emilydotgif “ if we're being technical collins FIRST used the gated reverb on peter gabriel's 3rd LP before in the air tonight”


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