Mix Techniques: 5 Ways to Use a Noise Gate

The following article contains affiliate links from which I may receive compensation at no cost to you. Audiomunk only recommends quality products from reputable retailers.

One of the most underused effects by novice and intermediate mixers is the noise gate. Not just for eliminating guitar noise, there are a myriad of ways to employ the device both functionally and creatively in most steps of the production process. Today, we will look at five ways to effectively use a noise gate.

1 – Eliminate hum/noise

The most basic application of a gate is to get rid of unwanted noise in a mix. In many instances, low-level hum on single coil electric guitars gets masked when the instrument is playing. But when it lays out, the hum peeks out and ruins the mix. A noise gate’s most basic use is to drop the volume whenever the instrument is laying out.

Setting It Up:

Find the level of your noise and adjust the floor of the gate to just above that level. Adjust the return to two or 3 dB to keep your gate from fluttering open and closed.

2 – Tighten Up the Drums

Gates can be used on a drum bus to choke down excessive ringing. The result of employing a gate in this situation are much tighter sounding drums in which the decays don’t overlap and interact too much.

Setting It Up:

Route all of your drums to a bus channel and place the gate first in your effects chain. You will need to adjust your threshold, return, attack, and release settings in order to allow your drums to breathe naturally. Try using a slightly longer attack to ensure your gate doesn’t trigger too close to your transients. Use your threshold and release settings to control your overall decay tails.

3 – Tighten Up the Rhythm Section

This is a trick I picked up from Bobby Owinski’s The Mixing Engineer’s Handbook – a phenomenal resource that I highly recommend. Essentially, you are inverting the use of the gate and turning it into an expander, delicately pumping the bass volume with the kick drum. This technique is better suited to traditional music rather than electronics, when you often want to duck the bass out of the way of the kick, but it could still be a useful technique depending on the situation.

Setting It Up:

Place your gate after other dynamics processors in your chain. Place your floor very high – -2dB/-3dB or so. This will slightly reduce the overall volume of the bass, which you may make up for with an equivalent boost in level should you deem it necessary. Sidechain the gate to the kickdrum, and adjust the threshold so your gate opens fully with each kickdrum hit. Your bass will now breathe with the kickdrum, further locking in the (hopefully tight) bass groove you have laid down on the track.

4 – Sidechain Ducking

The inverse of the previous technique, a gate could be used in place of a compressor to duck sounds out of the way of other sounds.

Setting It Up:

Drop the gate after dynamics processors on the desired channel. Adjust the floor to the level you want your sound to play as the trigger sound is playing. Sidechain to the triggering sound, be it a kick drum, a vocal or anything else. Invert the gate by pressing the proper button (usually flip or invert). This means the key will close the gate instead of opening it. Adjust the attack and release settings in order to make the gate breathe naturally with your track.

5 – Creative Cutting

Gating is a creative effect employed by DJs since times long forgotten. You can trigger your gate with a quantized arpeggiator, with another sound, or with your own playing. The effect is unmistakable and wickedly fun to experiment with.

Setting It Up:

Take a long sound like a pad or a vocal. Put the gate at the end of your effects chain. Set your noise floor low and your attack quick. On another channel, place any long-sustainable sound that can be triggered by an arpeggiator or by a controller. Mute that channel, but set your gate to be triggered pre-fader by sounds on the muted channel. Adjust the threshold on the gate to catch the triggering sounds on the muted track. Opt for a shorter release. Now whenever you trigger your controller, the long sound on the other track will cut out.

Conclusion

This is just a handful of ways you can employ gates in your productions. There are many others, but these are the ways I have used them before. Like you, I continue to learn and hone my craft with each successive project.

Until next week,

-Chris Lazaga
AudioMunk