Toolkit: Creative Gating

We run a full diagnostic test on the humble gate, and discover that its capabilities run deeper than you think

Gates – also known as ‘noise gates’ – are one of those wonderful pieces of music technology which were developed for one purpose but have since been completely reimagined. A gate features a Threshold level, and unless the sound passing through a gate reaches that level, the gate remains closed, effectively ‘silencing’ the part playing through it at times. This was extremely useful in the days when recording channels were inherently ‘noisy’ (such as tape), to ensure that the latent sound of hiss was shut off and was only heard when the part recorded to each track of the tape reached a certain volume. These days, the use of gates on individual tracks of a mix isn’t required in nearly the same way, but this hasn’t killed off the technology. Nowadays, the humble gate – in both hardware and software forms – continues to find favour.

The function of a gate can go beyond merely opening and closing based on volume threshold. Let’s suppose you have a sustained pad sound in your mix which you’d like to make less ‘flat’ and more rhythmic. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to achieve the desired result using your MIDI keyboard alone, as most pad sounds feature long attack and release times, which lack the percussive qualities necessary to produce a rhythmic performance. But using a gate, you can easily do this, by employing a sidechain trigger. If you set up a percussive sound on another track and select this as the sidechain ‘target’ for a gate inserted as an effect on your pad part, the sidechain input will open whenever the percussive source is detected. If you program the desired rhythm for the percussive part, this will super-impose that rhythm onto the pad sound, opening it to be heard with each percussive note, and closing it in the gaps.

To hear a basic example of sidechain gating, have a look and listen at the walkthrough on the next page. Effectively, then, gates allow us to control the volume of any sound. Mostly commonly, the gate acts as a kind of ‘binary switch’, either allowing a sound through (to be heard) or closing a sound down, to silence it. However, more sophisticated gates allow for more control, adding parameters to allow for more creative uses than mere ‘open or closed’ options. Watch the video this month to see how FabFilter’s Pro-G gate allows you to vary the volume threshold, so that ‘closed’ gate treatments don’t necessarily mean silent ones, as well as looking at the function of attack and release times to further modify the sound being gated.

This month we’re also looking at ways to achieve gating-style effects without actually employing gate plugins, and as we’ll see, your DAW’s audio editing tools offer a great place to start.