Sam Pura’s Tempo-Based Gating for Punchy The Story So Far Drums

Let’s face it: noise gates can be a nightmare. We’ve all been there—choppy, unnatural-sounding drums, kicks that lose their punch, and snare tails that get cut off awkwardly. Producer Sam Pura (The Story So Far, State Champs) used to hate them, too. He could never get them to work successfully until he started thinking about them in a completely different way, inspired by a thread from the legendary Eric Valentine.

The secret? Syncing your gates to the song’s tempo.

During a recent session mixing “Light Year” by The Story So Far, Sam walked us through his entire method for getting tight, clean, and powerful kick and snare sounds. It’s a game-changer for anyone struggling with drum bleed.

The Tempo-Sync Philosophy

The core idea is simple: instead of guessing your hold and release times, you calculate them based on your project’s BPM. This ensures the gate opens and closes in a way that’s musically and rhythmically in time with the song, preserving the natural feel while cleaning up the mess between hits.

For “Light Year,” the tempo is 162 BPM. Sam uses a simple BPM calculator app (you can find dozens online) to translate musical note values into milliseconds. This is the key to his whole setup. His plugin of choice for this task? The FabFilter Pro-G.

Dialing in The Kick Gate: Step-by-Step

Here’s how Sam sets up his kick gate from scratch to go from a bleed-filled track to a tight, focused punch.

Step 1: Create a Perfect Trigger

First things first, you need to make sure the gate only opens when the kick drum actually hits. Instead of relying on the gate’s internal filter, Sam uses an external sidechain trigger. He creates a “key spike”—a separate audio track with a sharp, clean transient for every kick hit—and routes it to the gate’s external sidechain input. Then, he cranks the gate’s threshold all the way up. This makes the gate completely deaf to the original kick track’s audio, ensuring it only opens when it receives a signal from the perfect key spike.

Step 2: Calculate Your Hold and Release Times

This is where the magic happens. Using his BPM calculator at 162 BPM, Sam finds the millisecond values for different note divisions.

• Eighth Note: 185ms
• Sixteenth Note: ~92.6ms

These values become the building blocks for the gate’s timing. The goal is to let the initial transient through and then control the decay in a way that fits the groove. If the kicks are playing fast sixteenth-note patterns, you need a gate that can keep up without smearing the hits together.

Step 3: Find the Sweet Spot by Experimenting

Sam’s initial thought was to hold the gate open for a 16th note (92.6ms) and have a release time of a 16th note (92.6ms). This creates a clean, eighth-note-long pocket of sound. However, after listening, he felt a longer release could sound a bit smoother and more forgiving.

After some tweaking, he landed on the final setting:

• Hold: 185ms (one eighth note)
• Release: 92.6ms (one sixteenth note)

This setting allows the full body of the kick to punch through and then quickly, but smoothly, fades out before the next hit or cymbal bleed can sneak in. The result? All of the impact with none of the mud. Once you get this right, any subsequent EQ moves you make will be far more effective because you’re working with a cleaner signal.

Step 4: Max Out the Lookahead

One final touch on the FabFilter Pro-G is the lookahead setting. Sam cranks it all the way to 10ms. In his words, this tells the gate to get “hella stoked that you’re going to open.” Essentially, it gives the gate a tiny heads-up that a transient is coming, allowing it to open more smoothly and transparently, avoiding any clipped attack.

Applying the Same Logic to the Snare

Beauty in simplicity, right? Sam literally copies the exact same FabFilter Pro-G setting over to his snare top and snare bottom tracks. He A/B tests the timing again, confirming that the 185ms hold and 92.6ms release feel just as good on the snare, giving it body while cleaning up hi-hat bleed between hits.

This perfectly tight, gated snare sound is the ideal foundation for blending in samples. Sam’s philosophy here is clear:

• Close Mics (Gated): Provide all the real-life impact, tone, and crack. Mute them, and the drum sounds thin and boring.
• Samples: Add the larger-than-life decay, consistent body, and “impressiveness.” Mute them, and you lose the polished power.

By gating the close mics tightly, you create a clean space for the sample tail to ring out without phasey, cluttered bleed from the live shells getting in the way. It’s a dynamic-shaping approach that works hand-in-hand with tools like compression to create a killer drum sound.

Why Isn’t Every Gate a “Tempo Gate”?

Sam’s frustration with the process is something many of us can relate to. “Why don’t they have a gate that does that?” he asks, wishing for a plugin where you could just select “eighth note hold” and “sixteenth note release” and have it sync automatically. He even has a name for his dream plugin: the “SLP Gate.”

It’s a great reminder that sometimes the best moves in mixing come from creatively working around the limitations of our tools. He’s not stressed about whether the FabFilter Pro-G is technically “better” than the gate in Slate Trigger; he’s focused on the result. He jokes that the only thing holding him back from a Grammy isn’t his plugin choice. The lesson is to stop getting bogged down in the endless nerdy details and keep your head in what really matters: making the music sound awesome.

This tempo-based gating technique is a perfect example of the practical, powerful strategies a pro producer uses to get world-class results. It’s not about some unobtainable magic preset; it’s about understanding a core concept and applying it to serve the song.

Want to see exactly how Sam Pura applies this concept and then builds the entire mix for The Story So Far’s “Light Year”?

Mixing is a collection of hundreds of these small but crucial decisions. At Nail The Mix, you can watch producers like Sam mix legendary tracks from scratch, explaining every plugin, every fader move, and every creative choice along the way. If you’re ready to move beyond presets and truly unlock your sound, seeing how the pros do it is the single best way to level up your skills. Get access to the full session with Sam Pura and dozens more from our full session archive when you join the NTM community.