Get a rhythmic gated effect without a gate

There are many ways to create volume modulation – here are three more advanced techniques

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We start with a basic backing track, comprised of a wonky drum pattern from FXpansion’s Geist, accompanied by a rim shot from NI’s Battery 4. Under this, a muted electro bassline is triggered from Spectrasonics’ Trilian. There’s a long auxiliary reverb on the rim shot.

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The reverb is clearly too long, but rather than just gate it in a traditional manner (abruptly cutting off the decay), instead we set a sidechain trigger by copying the drum pattern. Then we insert the FabFilter Pro-G after the rim shot’s reverb. This makes the reverb ‘groove’.

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Next, we add a pitched, dark texture from Absynth and let this play through all eight bars. As with all sustained textures, it dilutes from the spiky nature of everything else in the mix without any dynamic variation.

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Let’s try something other than gating with a plugin. Render the textural sound as audio, then chop it to create slices wherever a beat plays. We then randomly select a length for each piece of audio, to create a heavily ‘gated’ sequence without using a plugin.

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Our last new part is a Felt Piano melody (from Spectrasonics Omnisphere) which we bring in from halfway through the sequence. The core sound is moody and appropriate, but again, this part feels a little flat in its current guise.

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We set up Soundtoys’ Tremolator as an Insert on the Felt Piano channel, where we can draw a pattern in ‘Tweak’ mode. We can then apply this to our chosen steps of a 16th-note sequence. Finally, we tweak RateMod and Depth Mod to vary Tremolo speed. You can hear the result on the piano (soloed) and then with the track.