You could also place a gate on the snare drum and kick drum, for the same reasons. This helps to clean up the mix, and gives more definition to the sound of the toms coming through the mix. Using a gate on each tom’s microphone signal, you can eliminate this spill and only have the gate open when the toms are played. They may only be played a few times during a song, but the microphones dedicated to recording each tom will pick up the sound of the rest of the kit for the duration of the song. During recording, each microphone will pick up a lot of spill from the whole drum kit.Īn example would be with the tom drums. Gates are especially useful when recording and mixing drum kits. This allows the signal that has passed through the open gate to gradually fade, instead of being immediately cut off as soon as the gate closes. Release: this is the time it takes the gate to change from open to fully closed once the signal has fallen below the threshold.It combines with the release time to prevent the noise gate from affecting the sound once the threshold level has been reached. This helps to stop the natural decay of a sound being cut-off too early by the act of the gate closing. Hold: this is the time that the gate stays open once the audio signal has dropped below the threshold level.The attack time is how long it takes the gate to fully open once this threshold has been reached. Attack: once the level of the signal goes above the threshold level, the gate opens and the signal is allowed through.Threshold: if the audio signal drops below the threshold level, then the gate closes and the signal is muted.A gate often contains a setting called ‘hold’ as well. But the microphone recording the guitar would still pick up sound from the amp or from other instruments.īy inserting a gate into the signal path I could eliminate most, if not all, of this extra ‘noise’ which will help to keep the track sounding clearer and more professional.Ī noise gate, sometimes known as an audio gate, has similar basic controls to a compressor or limiter – including threshold, attack, and release. The main purpose for using one of these devices is to eliminate background sounds or instrument leakages from other sources, when the instrument or vocal you are recording is not playing or singing.įor example, if I was recording a guitar, there will probably be certain spaces in the song when it’s not actually being played (such as during the first verse).
Instead of limiting signals that rise above a specified threshold, the gate mutes a signal as it falls below the threshold. A noise gate is a bit like an upside-down limiter.
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