Other tricks
Well, the mix seems to be progressing nicely. Tracks have been cleaned up, compression and EQ applied where appropriate. Things are going nicely. Then Mr. Big from the record company decides to come to the studio and have a listen. "Great song" he shouts while rocking his head out-of-time with the music. "This is gonna be a smash hit." You nod in silent agreement. "Only one thing wrong though" wait for it… "There's not enough bottom!"

"Oh no… Who is this guy?" you're thinking. Well let me tell you. Ultimately, he's the guy paying your salary so smile and say "don't worry, my noise gate can fix that". And this is how it's done.

First you will need something that can generate a pure 50Hz sine wave - if you don't have an oscillator then just about any synthesiser will do. Then record that sine wave onto a spare track throughout the entire length of the song (now you think I'm going crazy).

Once the sine wave has been recorded, insert our new best friend (the noise gate) into that channel and take a feed from the kick drum track into the side chain input of the gate. Then set the gate's attack to zero (fast), hold to about 20ms and release to about 40ms.

Now adjust the threshold until the kick drum triggers the gate and you should hear short bursts of the sine wave in perfect synchronisation with the kick. All you need to do now is balance the sine wave with the kick.

This is a trick commonly used by dance producers to get a fat, heavy kick sound that hits you in the chest when you're on the dance floor. You will probably have to make a lot of fine adjustments to the gate's envelope before it sounds right, but Mr. Big will be happy and you will be handsomely rewarded.

Rhythmic gating
On further listening you notice a problem with a certain rhythm guitar part. Four distorted guitar tracks, all playing the same part and panned extreme left and right. The sound is good and the part fits nicely in the arrangement, but the playing isn't tight. This is the part…
Some chords are played very slightly early and some slightly late and this looseness is spoiling the track. Well guess what. Our noise gate can fix this. Don't believe me? Watch this.

First, route all of the rhythm guitar tracks into a stereo sub group and insert another gate into this group.

Then create a MIDI part that matches the rhythm of the guitar riff. It doesn't have to be the same notes, as long as the rhythm is there, that's all we need. Something like this will do.


Once you have created this MIDI part, assign an instrument to it with a very percussive sound - a piano for example. Then bounce it down to an audio file and import it back into the song on a spare track. Name this track "gate trigger".

At this point you can discard the MIDI part, as you don't need it anymore.

Now send the audio from the "gate trigger" track into the side chain input of the gate on the guitar sub group.
Set the gate's attack to zero and set the hold and release controls to fairly fast values. Then, hey presto, the rhythm guitar part is amazingly tight. Is that cool or what?
You will find that if you play around with the gate's envelope and range controls you can make this effect sound very extreme or very subtle.

Get in the groove
Another way gates can change the feel of a track is when they're used to create accents in musical parts. Here's an example.

Let's say there's a nice strummed, acoustic guitar part playing with the rhythm section. It's quite tight but lacking in dynamics. Just insert a gate on it and side chain the snare track into it. This time set the gate's "range" control to around -3dB. Use a fairly quick envelope and what you should hear is a 3dB increase in volume on the guitar part every time the snare hits. As this is usually on the back-beat (beats 2 and 4) this will very subtly push the groove along quite nicely. It's something you have to hear for yourself, so try it.

Finally
There's so many ways this simple, innocent tool can enhance your mixing experience it's just amazing to think about. Record producers have been making creative use of noise gates since the seventies disco boom, through the eighties - Madonna's Vogue, Seal's Crazy - and right up to the current day. It's one of the few tools that will never go out of fashion in this very fickle industry. Once you start getting creative with noise gates the ideas will just keep coming - I haven't even mentioned trance gating yet, that's probably worth another article. And finally, I was going to call this article "101 uses for a noise gate" but I was told to keep it short.

That's all for now.