importance of gating

how important is a good rackmount gate to a hardware setup?

It depends.

well i'm going to need a better answer than that. say so and so is using a big mixer with rack effects and stuff. i heard it helps to have a gate over the entire mix....

unless you have some extremely noisy gear and your music has quiet passages, it's not very important. depends on how noise-free you want your music to be

better to gate individual tracks than the entire mix - any reverb/fx tails would get chopped - but i guess you only have one gate?

post 2 versions of a track, gated and non gated and let us judge if gating helps

  YEK said:

well i'm going to need a better answer than that. say so and so is using a big mixer with rack effects and stuff. i heard it helps to have a gate over the entire mix....

If you have a synth that hums like fuck - don't gate it - get it fixed. If you have an accumulation of hiss from your old gear - enjoy your hip SAW 1 cred and leave it!

Gating the entire mix is retarded, The gate wont even close until you are playing nothing at all. Who the fuck cares if there is hiss coming out of the speakers when you aren't playing?

Are you going to record some distorted amplified guitars? Get a gate. Otherwise, don't bother.

tough crowd....

well. i was reading up about what gating was seeing as i have never used it before and it seems like a pointless thing to me i think. seems like a kind of effect that a mastering studio would use and not a bedroom musician....

ak. ok.

hey do you guys know what type of reverb was used on saw ii while were chillxing in this thread, i don't want to make another one.

i have a pretty nice gate limiter/compressor rack mount in my gear. i love that piece of equipment. gater is completely necessary for guitar and the compressor erally finishes it off. i would highly recommend something like that. mine was approx 250 bucks.

edit- i think it was clsoer to 200 bucks now that i think of it.

Gating is not important for synths unless you use extreme settings for effect (*guilty!*), but it can be very useful when you record drums in a large room or in a noisy place and you want them to be snappy and present in the room while at the same time not letting the tails of the drums muddle the mix ( cut them out below the threshold). I wouldn't know why you would use it as a mastering effect, I have no real music experience or knowledge thuogh, Im mostly a hobbiest at the moment, but ive messed around with gates enough to know how to get good effects from them, I think.

EDIT: actually in general if you want choppy slick snappy drums a noise gate(thats what you mean by gate right?) is the easiest/best way to get them in my opinion. Even if they are already sequenced. It usually goes like EQ > gate > some kind of distortion or ridiculous compression.

why would you run ANY kind of effect on an entire track, ever?

good question.

*turns to next user*

  beneboi said:

why would you run ANY kind of effect on an entire track, ever?

no, but to kind of answer you're question, this is just what i heard from some user review i read online. that's how someone was using it. maybe it wasn't over his ENTIRE mix. maybe just a MIXDOWN? i dunno. i'm (somewhat) new to this, gating anyway, so go easy on me dude.

not trying to make you feel bad, personally whatever i make/record music on i try to get as dry a mix as possible and i dont use any after effects i.e. if im using a hardware sampler, some synths in reason or absynth, and a microphone, i want the effect on each individual track, and then mix it down in a 3rd program, normally audition, in which i just multitrack everything and adjust volumes

The only thing I've ever used a noise gate on is heavily distorted guitar, though I could see how it could be useful on drums too.

Yeah mostly for recording drums.

But I suppose if you used really extreme settings on it you could get some interesting effects.

Not really useful to gate an entire mix. Generally speaking you want to do what the earlier poster said, get your FX on each track. Maybe some slight compression if necessary on the overall mix, but best if you don't have to do that even.

Gating drums = the 80s

Gating drums mega ultra hard and getting the tail off a separate mic on the other side of a room = In The Air Tonight

needs more phil collins !

thanks guys

gates are fun.... use them on anything, if it sounds good!

extreme gated drums = glitchy sounding

side chained gated pad = rhythmic pads

gated bass = more punchy/less punchy depending on the settings.

just look at it as an attack/decay shaper. If you dont have an envelope for the sound (like its just a recording or sample that isnt in a sampler) put a gate on it to make it more punchy, or less punchy, or shorter and tighter.

I hardly ever use a gate for noise removal... mostly because Im not recording instruments that produce hum etc.... so just use it as a creative tool... there is lots to do with it

Scientist did some incredible stuff with gates on his legendary Greensleeves dub albums. He took the dub cliche of making the snare hit really loooong with reverb and reversed it to a really short sharp hit using a gate. Then he would alternate between the two techniques on alternate snare hits, which sounds incredible, or gate the snare back to just its attack and stick a reverb on that...

a multifx unit i have on longterm loan has a gate mode. so far, all i've done with it is feed it back into itself with some drums and weird settings so i get tghe sound of cthulhu having indigestion

I'm suprised by the comments here. Nobody here uses a limiter on their master track or multi-band compressor or even eq?

  Bubba69 said:

I'm suprised by the comments here. Nobody here uses a limiter on their master track or multi-band compressor or even eq?

of course, almost every track you ever hear will have had some effects put on the entire mix, these are vital tools of the last and very important stage in making a track, the mastering. however, its best to leave mastering to the mastering engineer.

ie concentrate on the mix and leave the overall effects to someone who REALLY knows what they are doing, its very easy to ruin your track in mastering, but its pretty vital for high quality results.

if you are gonna do it yourself, take your time, read allot about it and always keep a clean version of your mix handy so you can try again!

as for gating, yup, as people said traditionally it would be used to tame distorted guitars or tighten drums, but like all gear could be used in any number of crazy ways to get strange effects.

@ yek, when people talk about a mixdown they usually mean the entire mix! the mixdown is the name for the process of mixing down (genius hey? :) )any number of tracks to one. so you could for example 'mixdown your drum tracks to save cpu' but when you are talking about an actual MIXDOWN (not just the process) that normally means a finished track made into one 'master mix' wav ready to have overall effects put on it in the mastering process!

I cant imaging he would use a gate on the whole mix, if he did that i can imagine two outcomes, 1 - it sounds rubbish or 2 - you cant hear any difference whatsoever apart from maybe a bit of hiss at the start and the end! he probably meant that while mixing he gated a single track within his mix or summat :)

  Bubba69 said:

I'm suprised by the comments here. Nobody here uses a limiter on their master track or multi-band compressor or even eq?

wtf? see my above post

wait n/m not on my master track wtf lol

  Bubba69 said:

I'm suprised by the comments here. Nobody here uses a limiter on their master track or multi-band compressor or even eq?

None of those things are gates, Einstein.

i have an LA Audio 4x4 from way back in the day - i often get it out for that Shaman guitar sound.

i can move, move, move any mountain

good times.

in answer to your question - no you do not need a gate.