Black Salt Audio: Silencer Drum Gate Plug-In

Subtitled “Where cymbals go to die,” Silencer is a plug-in that claims to remove drum bleed on the individual tracks of a drum set recorded live, a problem I frequently deal with while mixing. I hate resorting to drum samples and would prefer to use the real drum tracks sent to me for mixing, but sometimes poor mic placement, over-compression during tracking, and erratic performances can derail achieving a decent and impactful drum mix. Black Salt Audio claims that with Silencer, "your live drum tracks will sound as clean as drum samples." I don't think that is 100% true, but it is gating drums in a powerful and new way. For troublesome drum gating issues, I frequently use Sonnox's Oxford Drum Gate [Tape Op #135], which allows me to sample hits that are not being detected so the gate opens, and I can also teach it hits I don't want to open. However, it's a very different tool from Silencer.

Gating drum tracks improperly can suck all of the life out of a drum recording. Even though a soloed drum track may seem improved with gating, in many cases, after putting the kit back together, quite a bit of energy gets lost. Kick and snare will frequently miss some of the complexity of transients, tone, and sustain, and the control I may have gained with gating is now making my drum mix sound small. Silencer can help with that, given its apparent behind-the-GUI work going on and unique DeBleed feature.

With icon-identified settings for snare top, snare bottom, kick, and toms, simply pick the drum type to be processed. Hitting play reveals a visual of the track's waveform peaks scrolling by. Grab the Threshold slider, then drag the orange line down across the middle of Silencer’s Waveform Visualizer just far enough to let only the drum hits that need to come through. Start with Reduction, DeBleed, and Length at 12 o'clock. Solo the track, listen to the drum's decay, and adjust Length to remove the unwanted drum hits that follow (if needed). Then listen for bleed, especially the high end of hi-hats and cymbals. Adjust the DeBleed but be careful; it can sound a little unnatural with extreme settings! Finally, un-solo the track and listen closely to the drums while activating and bypassing the Silencer plug-in. If the drums sound noticeably better bypassed use less Reduction, which is effectively a wet/dry mix control.

The DeBleed feature is interesting. On a recent mix job, an excessively bright hi-hat was bleeding all over the mic’d snare. In this instance, Silencer was too much, choking the decay of the snare. I created/copied a parallel snare track, added Silencer 100% Reduction, and tuned in the DeBleed to remove the hi-hat. Then I boosted some top end, compressed it hard, and blended it in under the original snare channel. This idea goes back to an old analog gating trick I used to do on tape sessions, and it worked, adding a snap to the snare.

This plug-in appears to be intelligent, seemingly able to identify individual parts of the kit even when its Threshold might not be set low enough. There might be a bit more going on under the hood than we can see or control, but this feature works well and makes Silencer easy to use. For what feels like decades, I have been meticulously cleaning up rack and floor tom tracks by hand before mixing. Once I began using Silencer on my mix jobs, it worked so well that when carefully applied it did a better job than manual edits in a lot less time. Between Silencer and Sonnox’s Oxford Drum Gate, I can successfully tackle all drum kit mixing issues. They each cover tasks the other doesn’t, and when we need them, we probably really require one or the other! Silencer is affordable, intuitive, and can help get a mixer out of a bind.