Mixing A Day To Remember Drums: Andrew Wade’s “Dream Gate” Technique

Getting clean, punchy, and consistent drums is the backbone of any massive metal mix. We’ve all been there: you dial in a standard gate, but it either chatters on the fast fills or cuts off the transients you actually want. You try editing every hit by hand, but that takes forever and kills your creative flow. So, what’s the solution?

Enter Andrew Wade—the producer/mixer behind bands like A Day To Remember and Wage War—and his legendary “Dream Gate” method. It’s a powerful, semi-automated process that gives you perfectly isolated and even drum hits, creating an incredibly tight foundation for any modern mix. Forget what you know about traditional gates; this is a whole new level of control. Let’s break it down.

The Problem: Why Standard Gates and Manual Edits Fall Short

In a dense metal mix, drum consistency is everything. The problem is that standard noise gates are often not fast or smart enough to handle the job. They can get confused by bleed from cymbals or other drums, leading to false triggers or, even worse, chopping off the initial attack of a hit.

The alternative—manually tabbing to every transient and cutting it by hand—is incredibly precise but painfully slow. For a song with blast beats and complex fills, you could spend hours just cleaning up the shells. The Dream Gate method combines the precision of manual editing with the speed of an automated process.

Step-by-Step: Building the Dream Gate in Pro Tools

The core idea is to slice every drum hit at its transient, make every resulting clip the exact same length, apply perfect fades, and then normalize each hit individually. The result? Every single kick, snare, and tom hit is perfectly clean and has the same powerful impact.

Here’s how Andrew Wade does it, step-by-step.

Step 1: Prep Your Workspace

Before you start slicing, get organized. You don’t want to mess with your original recordings.

1. Duplicate Playlists: Select your kick, snare, and tom tracks. In Pro Tools, duplicate the playlists. This creates a copy you can work on while keeping the original audio safe and sound on an inactive playlist.
2. Group Your Tracks: Group these new “edit” tracks together. This will let you apply edits to all of them simultaneously, which is a huge time-saver.

Step 2: Slice Transients with Beat Detective

This is where the process begins. We’ll use Pro Tools’ Beat Detective to analyze and separate each drum hit into its own clip. The settings are crucial and different for each drum.

Kicks: The Counterintuitive “High Emphasis” Trick

For the kick drum, you might think “Low Emphasis” is the way to go, but Wade uses a clever trick.

• Analysis Mode: Set Beat Detective to High Emphasis. Counterintuitively, this helps it ignore the low-end bleed from the snare and focus more accurately on the beater’s clicky attack.
• Detection: Enable 16th notes and triplets to catch complex patterns.
• Threshold: Adjust the sensitivity so that all the kick hits are detected, but not the snare bleed. You may need to go through and manually adjust a few transient markers, but it’s much faster than doing them all by hand.
• Once you’re happy, choose Clip Separation to make the cuts.

Snares: Precision with “Low Emphasis”

For the snare, the settings are a bit different.

• Analysis Mode: Use Low Emphasis to focus on the body of the snare.
• Trigger Pad: Set this to 1 ms. This gives you a tiny bit of space before the transient, ensuring you don’t cut off the initial attack. It’s a small detail that makes a big difference.
• Threshold: Again, find the sweet spot to detect all the snare hits. For fast snare rolls or blast beats where some hits might be missed, just highlight that specific section and re-run Beat Detective with a more sensitive threshold.

Toms: Isolate and Conquer

Toms are usually the easiest. Since they aren’t played constantly, you can just highlight the sections of the song with tom fills, run Beat Detective with similar settings to the snare, and let it slice them up.

Step 3: The “Protective Fade” and Uniform Clip Sizing

1. Apply a “Protective Fade”: Select all the newly created clips across your drum tracks. Add a 20 ms fade-in to the start of every single clip. This might seem weird, but it serves a critical purpose in the next step.
2. Shorten All Clips: Using the Object Tool (the grabber hand), select all the clips again. Now, use your Nudge value and a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + Minus on the numeric keypad in Pro Tools) to shorten all the clips at once.
3. The Process: Start with a larger nudge value (like 1000) and repeatedly hit the shortcut. The clips will get shorter. As they stop shrinking, decrease your nudge value (e.g., to 500, then 100, then 20) and continue.
4. The Protection: The 20 ms fade you added earlier acts as a “stopper.” Pro Tools won’t let you shorten a clip past its fade, so this ensures no clip gets accidentally deleted. By the end, every single drum hit will be a clip of exactly the same length.

Step 4: Setting the Gate Length and Shape

1. Remove Fades: First, remove that 20 ms protective fade from all clips.
2. Extend the Clips: Use the nudge shortcut again (this time, Ctrl + Plus) to make all the clips longer. Be careful not to make them so long that they overlap, especially during fast fills. You can extend clips in slower sections more than clips in blast beats.
3. Apply Final Fades: This is your actual “gate.”
   • Snare & Toms: Apply a 1 ms fade-in and a steep, aggressive fade-out that covers the rest of the clip’s length. This gives you a clean attack and a fast, controlled decay with no bleed.
   • Kick: Use the same aggressive fade-out, but with a slightly longer 5 ms fade-in to preserve a touch more of the low-end impact.

Step 5: The Magic of Clip-by-Clip Normalization

This is the final step that brings it all together. Using the AudioSuite “Normalize” plugin, you can make every single hit perfectly even in volume.

The settings here are absolutely critical:

• Processing Mode: Set it to Clip by Clip. This is the most important setting. It tells Pro Tools to normalize each clip individually, rather than the entire track as a whole.
• Target Level: Don’t normalize to 0 dBFS. Andrew sets it to around -5 dB to leave plenty of headroom for later processing.
• Other Settings: Make sure “Create Individual Files” is checked and that any “handle” or extra padding is set to zero.

Render this across all your edited drum tracks. You now have a drum performance where every single hit is perfectly clean, perfectly gated, and perfectly even.

Why This Works So Well for Modern Metal

The result of the Dream Gate is an unbelievably consistent drum foundation.

This is especially powerful when you start blending in samples. A common issue is having your loud, triggered sample paired with a quiet, acoustic ghost note, which creates a weird, inconsistent snare tone. With this method, your acoustic shells have the same consistency as your samples, ensuring your blend is solid and powerful from the first hit to the last. For parts like blast beats where this might sound too aggressive, you can simply blend a little of the original, unprocessed drum track back in for more natural dynamics.

Taking it to the Next Level

This “Dream Gate” technique is a game-changer for getting clean drum shells, but it’s just one part of a killer drum sound. The real art comes from how you blend these perfect transients with your samples, overheads, and room mics, and then shape it all with powerful compression techniques and surgical metal EQ strategies.

Imagine watching Andrew Wade do this in real-time and then build the entire A Day To Remember mix around it. That’s exactly what you get at Nail The Mix. In his full Nail The Mix session, Andrew shows you not just this trick, but how he dials in samples, glues the drum bus together, and makes the entire kit punch through a dense wall of guitars.

This is the kind of next-level thinking that separates pros from hobbyists. If you’re ready to move beyond presets and generic tutorials, check out our free training on Mixing Modern Metal Beyond Presets. Or, to see this exact method in action on a real A Day To Remember track, grab access to the full session here.