The Story So Far: Sam Pura’s Tempo-Synced Kick & Snare Gates

Let’s be honest, getting kick and snare gates to sound good and not like a choppy, unnatural mess can be a nightmare. If you’ve ever wrestled with gates, feeling like they just suck the life out of your drums, you’re not alone. Producer Sam Pura (The Story So Far, State Champs) used to hate them too. That is, until a revelation inspired by the legendary Eric Valentine changed his whole approach, leading to the super clean and punchy drum sounds heard on records like The Story So Far’s.

We dove into a session with Sam to see exactly how he dials in his kick and snare gates, transforming them from frustrating tools into essential allies for a killer drum mix. Forget generic settings; Sam’s method is all about musicality and tempo.

Check out the full session right here. Let’s dive in!

From Gate Hater to Gate Lover: The Eric Valentine Influence

It’s a familiar story for many producers: gates feeling clunky, artificial, and just plain difficult. Sam Pura was firmly in that camp. He’d never managed to get gates working successfully until he stumbled upon a Gearslutz thread where Eric Valentine detailed the critical role gating played in his workflow, even shaping entire guitar sounds with them. This sparked an idea: what if gates could be more intuitive and musical?

The Dream: A Tempo-Synced “SLP Gate”

Sam’s frustration with existing gate plugins, even powerful ones, is that they often lack a crucial feature: true BPM-synced parameters for hold and release based on musical note values. Imagine a gate where instead of dialing in milliseconds, you could just select “eighth note hold” or “sixteenth note release,” and it would automatically sync to your project’s tempo. This is the core idea behind Sam’s dream plugin, tentatively dubbed the “SLP Gate.”

While the SLP Gate isn’t on the market (yet!), Sam has developed a killer workflow using FabFilter Pro-G to achieve a very similar, tempo-based result.

Dialing in The Story So Far’s Kick & Snare Gates with FabFilter Pro-G

For this particular The Story So Far track, the tempo is a driving 162 BPM. Sam’s entire gating strategy for the kick and snare revolves around this tempo, ensuring the gates open and close in a way that grooves with the song.

The Tempo-Based Calculation is Key

Since most gates don’t have direct note-value inputs for hold and release, Sam uses a handy BPM calculator app (you can find plenty online). This app translates note values at 162 BPM into milliseconds.

• At 162 BPM:
  • An eighth note = 185 ms
  • A sixteenth note = 92.59 ms

These values become the building blocks for his gate settings.

Kick Gate Settings: Precision and Punch

Let’s look at how Sam sets up the FabFilter Pro-G on the kick drum. The goal is to let the initial transient and a very specific length of the drum’s body through, then clamp down hard to eliminate bleed before the next hit or from other kit pieces.

1. External Sidechain: Crucially, the threshold on the Pro-G is set all the way up. The gate isn’t listening to the audio on the track itself to open; it’s being triggered by an external sidechain signal (likely a clean trigger track or a heavily processed version of the kick designed purely to open the gate reliably). This ensures consistent triggering from the intended source only.
2. Initial Thought: 16th Note Hold + 16th Note Release:
   • Hold: 92.59 ms (to hold open for a 16th note)
   • Release: 92.59 ms (for a 16th note fade out)
     This combination effectively gives you a clean eighth note’s worth of kick.
3. Refinement for Smoothness – Eighth Note Hold + Sixteenth Note Release:
   Sam found that giving it a slightly longer hold and a quicker release felt more forgiving and smoother for this track.
   • Hold: 185 ms (an eighth note, allowing more of the drum’s natural body)
   • Release: 92.59 ms (a sixteenth note, for a quick but not abrupt fade)

   This setting ensures the gate stays open for the core of the kick’s desired sound and then closes quickly and cleanly.

4. Lookahead: Sam often cranks the lookahead on the FabFilter Pro-G, for instance, to around 10ms. He describes this as the gate “getting hella stoked that you’re going to open.” Essentially, lookahead allows the gate to anticipate the incoming transient and open more smoothly, preventing the very start of the hit from being clipped. He’s found the best success with it all the way up, or close to it.

The same settings, or very similar ones, are then applied to the Kick Out microphone, ensuring both contribute to a cohesive, clean kick sound. The beauty of this method is how much it cleans up the low-end mud and cymbal bleed without making the kick sound overly processed or choked. It still sounds like their kick, just tighter and more defined. This clean foundation means your subsequent processing, like anything on your EQ hub page or compression hub page, can work much more effectively on the signal you actually want to hear.

Snare Gate Settings: Adapting for Character

The exact same principles are applied to the snare drum, using the FabFilter Pro-G.

• Initial Test (like the kick): Hold at 92.59ms, Release at 92.59ms.
• Refinement for Forgiveness: Sam leaned towards a slightly more forgiving setting here as well. For the snare top and bottom mics, he might opt for something like:
  • Hold: 185ms (eighth note)
  • Release: 92.59ms (sixteenth note)

This allows the snare’s crack and a bit of its body to come through cleanly before the gate shuts down, removing hi-hat bleed and kick rumble.

The “Why”: Impact, Tone, and Sample Integration

Why go to all this trouble? Sam explains that for his drum sounds, “all my impact and all my tone is really coming from my close mic.” If you mute the close mics, the drums sound thin, boring, and overly attack-y. Gating ensures that these crucial close mics are clean and focused.

This also plays a massive role in how drum samples integrate. With the close mics tightly gated, the added samples (which provide decay, tail, and “impressiveness”) can blend seamlessly without fighting against a wash of bleed from the live kit. The result is a powerful, modern drum sound that combines the best of live performance and sample enhancement. Once he’s happy with the blend, Sam will often print the samples to save processing power and commit to the sound.

Sam’s Gating Philosophy: FabFilter, Simplicity, and Musicality

When asked why he prefers the FabFilter Pro-G over something like the gate in Slate Trigger (which is primarily a drum replacer), Sam mentions that Trigger is more of a “heavy lifter” for replacement, and he found the FabFilter gate, particularly after a recommendation from Nolly Getgood, worked well for his “spike” (external sidechain) and BPM-based tweaking approach. He admits there’s no “perfect gate” and is always open to trying new things if they improve the mix.

Ultimately, Sam’s approach to plugins, including gates, is to keep it simple. He doesn’t want to get bogged down in endless tweaking. “I hate plugins. I hate ’em so much,” he jokes, emphasizing that he wants to focus on making music, not getting lost in a sea of parameters. For his gating, once the external sidechain is set, he’s primarily focused on just two knobs: Hold and Release, dialed in rhythmically.

Take Control of Your Drum Gates

Sam Pura’s tempo-based gating technique for The Story So Far’s drums offers a powerful way to achieve clean, punchy, and musical results:

1. Embrace Tempo: Calculate your hold and release times based on your song’s BPM and desired note values.
2. Use an External Sidechain: Trigger your gates from a clean, dedicated source for maximum consistency.
3. Leverage FabFilter Pro-G (or similar): Utilize its precise controls for hold, release, and lookahead.
4. Prioritize Close Mics: Gate them tightly to capture their essential impact and tone without bleed.
5. Blend with Samples: Use clean, gated live drums as a foundation for impactful sample layering.

This method isn’t just about noise reduction; it’s about shaping the envelope of your drums to perfectly fit the groove of the song.

Want to see more pros like Sam Pura break down their actual mix sessions, explaining every plugin, setting, and decision? At Nail The Mix, you get exactly that. Each month, you get the multi-tracks from a real song and watch the original producer mix it from scratch. Dive deeper into how The Story So Far’s powerful sound comes together by checking out Sam Pura’s full session on Nail The Mix. And if you’re looking to elevate your metal mixing skills beyond presets, grab our free Ebook, “Unlock Your Sound: Mixing Modern Metal Beyond Presets.” See firsthand how to apply techniques like these and so much more by exploring everything Nail The Mix offers.