And now every time I see your username, I’ll think, “there’s that bastard with a JP-8!”
Nothing’s very rare any more in this age of plugins:
It’s the Phil Collins effect I had in mind.
I don’t think you get that sound by applying the noise gate directly to the drums though (that’s is a pretty common practice in any decade, and it’s mostly about stopping the rest of the kit bleeding into, say, a kick-drum mic). What you do is you put a big, cheesy digital reverb on the drums, and then apply the noise-gate to chop off the reverb tails.
So your signal chain would be: FX send bus -> Reverb -> noise-gate (set with a high threshold and a fast attack).
… Just in case anyone out there was wanting to recreate the 80s. 
Provided that you wanted to sound like several million very angry buzzing bees. 
True enough. I was listening to this kind of stuff in the 80s: Hunters & Collectors - Talking To A Stranger - YouTube
Yep, or the use of Chorus and/or Flanger effects to sound like you were at the ocean.
I’ve sort of noticed that there was a dramatic change in the kinds of sounds synths made once the '90s rolled around. In the '70s and '80s, the whole point of synths was to create new sounds. Those sounds were monophonic in the '70s and polyphonic in the '80s, but they were new sounds.
The '90s rolled around and brought sampling with them, and suddenly the main use of synths seemed to be to simply reproduce familiar sounds and instruments. For example, putting an orchestra on a song without actually hiring an orchestra.
That created a fairly clear line between the “'80s sound” and later sounds.
Also, what somebody said about “trebly” sounds. The bass guitar was usually deemphasized in the mix, unless the band’s sound was formed around a particularly talented bass player. For example, Iron Maiden. As hip-hop became more cross-genre influential in the '90s, bass started to be emphasized more.
ETA: Also, '80s pop had a lot of those “yelpy” British Duran Duran-style vocals that eventually went out of style. I was amused when looking at some '80s Japanese pop and hearing the singers using that “yelpy” style.
Here’s some of what I listened to in the 1980s.
ETA: Yeah, the typical 80s pop stuff and lots of pop/rock had tons of reverb and loads of crappy compression with gates for everything; it was new and people loved using new shit. Eventually we all decided it sounded like shite, and pop decided to co-opt rap & hip-hop because metal and hardcore were way scarier than music made by black people.
A couple of points about the “trebly” sound of eighties music…
First, it was the age of the Aural Exciter, which was supposed to increase the “presence” of the track – or in other words, put more treble in it.
Secondly, this was also the time when the record labels were re-releasing their stuff on CDs. Mostly, they were taking the original masters on tape and converting them to digital. And the trouble with this is that when you mix on tape you’ll bump up the treble, hoping that some of it will survive the manufacturing process of making a vinyl record. When CDs came along, the over-hyped treble got faithfully converted, and those early analog to digital converters were really bad at doing treble, introducing lots of distortion and crap in the process. So if you’ve got CDs from the eighties, they’ll sound kind of horrible and trebly.
The way to do a really good sounding digital mix is to go easy on the treble and emphasize the bass (because deep, articulate bass is what digital recording does really well). They didn’t really understand that in the eighties, though, and to this day there are sound engineers who hate digital because the techniques they learned in the analog world don’t translate to the new medium (e.g. I keep turning the treble up and it just sounds bad, ergo, digital sucks.)
I think it had to change. Those digital synth sounds were so cheesy and dated that it couldn’t have gone on. A couple of years ago I bought an old Echo and the Bunnymen album, and I was disappointed with it, because the 80s style synths made it unlistenable to me. It was one of those “what on earth were people thinking” moments. And yet, I hear stuff from that same band that’s more guitars than synths, and it doesn’t sound nearly as dated.
I’m not dissing the 80s, though. Every era has its Achilles heel. In the 50s it was wretched novelty songs. In the 2000s it was the loudness wars.
Hehe. I’ll see you’re Circle Jerks and raise you some Electro Hippies. 
(Play Fast or Die is probably my favorite hardcore EP of the eighties. There’s a Peel Sessions that’s pretty good as well. But their album was crap.)
Heh. Same way “old school” recording engineers even now hope the bass player shows up with a Fender P or J bass, or maybe a Rickenbacker: they know how those “should” sound and what setting they should use on the mixing board. Bass player shows up with some fancy, “boutique” custom bass, and the engineer just isn’t sure what to do.
Yes, it’s the thin sound that makes 80’s music so identifiable to me. In spite of the many diverse styles and incorporation of ethnic and world influences, the overall production of music in that era was brittle. It’s like each instrument was allowed only a certain tiny range of the frequency spectrum, and the whole song was pushed into the treble end of the spectrum. Bass was definitely de-emphasized. The first thing that strikes me when I hear an 80’s song (compared to modern music) is no bottom. The synth sounds are grating too, and horribly clichéd to modern ears. Also vocals were generally pushed more to the front. I hear some of that music today and cannot believe that I once liked it. But then I am always interested in what’s new and don’t have much appetite for oldies of any era.
Snowboarder and Kim, that’s cheating. OP was talking about 80’s pop.
S.O.D. (M.O.D.), Slayer, Circle Jerks, and Fear certainly didn’t typify the 80’s sound. If anything they were the antithesis, their sonic guns aimed at the 7 minute plus disco instrumental masturbation of the 70’s disco demonstrations of keyboard, synth, and drum machine programming prowess. They were retro-progressive in their day and returned to the 50’s methodology of unprocessed, 3-minute-or-less attacks against the synth-driven music of the 70’s.
Even the Ramones, blessed be, albums of the 80’s were over produced tripe compared to Ramones and Rocket to Russia …
Punk and hardcore from the 80’s can’t really be included in a discussion about the 80’s sound. They were purposefully outside of it.
Fair enough.
And yet, for me, the eighties was all about the underground stuff – especially for a teenager in urban Australia, such as I was. I had plenty of Sonic Youth and Dead Kennedys records, but Milli Vanilli wasn’t on my radar at all.
I’ve still got my first bass guitar that I bought in 1989. (Not one of the name brands, because American imports were and still are ridiculously overpriced in Australia.) It actually puts out that kind of bitey, mid-rangey eighties bass tone. I keep it specifically for when I want that sound.
Here’s an example of it: boxstr.net
Actually, I was going for an eighties pop kind of vibe for that song…
Take the song China by Red Rockers … no keyboards to speak of (if any at all), yet distinctively 80s.
Can someone identify the specific elements that provide that 80s sound?
Reverb a mile wide, on the snare and vocals.
And, it strikes me that that style of song uses pretty sparse rhythm guitar, both harmonically and rhythmically (ie, two or three note chords, and only strumming every other beat or so). That feels pretty typical of other songs of the era.
I tried to click on it and I couldn’t get the link to work.
This is true. People hear “80s music” and they generally just think “new wave.” The Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Flaming Lips, Dinosaur Jr., the Jesus and Mary Chain - all of these bands were around in the '80s.
I was listening to a new song about being into someone (young love and all that), and it occured to me that ‘80s music seemed more political or socially-attuned than today’s music. The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum (Fun Boy Three) took jabs at Reagan and Thatcher, for example. Or Shiny Shiny (Haysi Fantayzee) was a happy little dance number that had an Authority Figure threatening to ‘use [his] Colt’. Suicidal Tendencies’ Institutionalized highlights the conflict between a teen, and parents who assume the worst because they can’t communicate. I got a much more anti-Establishment vibe from '80s music than I get from new music. (Maybe you f*ckers should invite me to your parties so I can hear newer stuff!)
How do you get a guitar to have a “thin” sound?