When asked if he feels pride about adding such a distinctive sound to the drums, Big Mick is quick to say no. ‘It was a problem and we just resolved it. Same thing with the toms. The tom gates would keep opening every time Lars hit the cymbals near to them, you’d get that psst psst because it would spike the threshold on the gate and to get them to stay closed was next to impossible. So what we used to do, is use this D-drum 2 machine, because Lars would beat the snare into submission in about 30 seconds, so I started to run a sample snare of the D-Drum just to help out, but that didn’t really work, there was always a delay and it just sounded weird. But it did come with these very small Fishmann piezo-electric triggers. I was looking at one of those one day and thought ‘If I plug this in on a key input on a noise gate, is that going to make the gate work?’ So I plugged it in, flicked it and the gate worked!. Once it’s taped to the shell of the drum, if you so much as tap the rim, the gate opens, but you can also fire the biggest noise at it and the gate would never open if you don’t want it to. For years everyone thought we were using triggers, but it’s just to operate the noise gates.’
And my XL8 allows me to do this as well, I just plug it into the splitter and call up a menu on the key inputs on the gates and select a mic input to do the trigger for the gate. So that is another example of things being born out of necessity. I’ve turned a few people on to it, Eddie Mapp does it with Evanescence.
