In Summary

In expert hands, the humble noise gate became a secret weapon that dazzled listeners with brand new sounds. Since then many of these techniques have disappeared. Here we ask why that is in modern studios without any limits on what’s possible…

Going Deeper

Why Gates Are Significant In Music Production

Let’s face it: many studios have too many toys. Even since the hardware excesses of late last century, the plethora of creative tools available to us is now filling up our hard drives where previously it filled the furniture.

In terms of ear candy, we have effects for spaced-out tricks and modulation, compressors for pumped-up kicks and creative annihilation, and a whole other gamut of space age sounds courtesy of synth marvels, Auto-Tune, samplers, and all the rest besides.

Before digital, there were still many ways to elevate or enhance sounds by generating complimentary atmospheres with reverb and delay, or inflating what was already there with compression. One processor, however, was able to change the very nature of sound more obviously by changing its envelope completely: the noise gate.

As the name suggests, these were developed to deal with low-level trouble-makers such as tape hiss or doing the odd drum kit spill cleanup. That said, their ability to chop off sounds in their prime was exploited in the pre-DAW era by a number of trailblazers to get sounds that had simply never been heard before.

Rather than enhancing or adding to sounds, actually discarding sound for effect had arrived.

Sliced Synths

Above is a record that was made when digital hardware synths already sported various gating and arpeggiation effects of their own. But in need of something far more extraordinary was the pad sound in Seal’s Crazy, to our ears created with a standalone gate. By feeding its sidechain input with a custom-programmed drum machine pattern, this record’s signature syncopated slices were immortalised forever.

Gated Ambience

Above is perhaps one of the best examples of gates creating a sound that had not been heard before up until that point. This was discovered by accident when the SSL console’s listen mics, complete with insane amounts of squash from the console’s Listenback Mic Compressor (LMC), were inadvertently opened up in-between takes. The resulting sound’s sheer size and length made gating the signal and recording it the natural next step leading to Hugh Padgham’s monumental gated creation.

Later expansions on this technique (pun intended) by others involved keying distant ambience from close mics for more selective explosions of room sound.

Expanded Vocals

Artificial reverb on vocals must be the oldest mix effects out there. But in 1977 Tony Visconti went back the other way, using gates to engineer an evolving real ambience to serve the momentum in David Bowie’s vocal on Heroes.

This was achieved with three mics: one close up, one in the middle of the room at around 15-20 feet, and a third mic at 50 feet or so. The more distant mics were gated to open up at the desired points in the song as the performance grew in intensity. The louder Bowie sang, the bigger his voice became.

Tighter Bass

As well as ‘showcase’ effects that dazzled the beholder, gating could be used in ways that went unnoticed by the listener. A classic trick was to gate the bass guitar off the kick. By feeding the bass gate’s sidechain with the kick signal, early notes could be held off until the drum punched through with the bass following in perfect sync. This was significant in an age where editing tracks independently of each other was virtually impossible.

It’s true to say that the trade off with many of these tricks was the time taken to set them up with the spectre of mix revisions never far away… Hence many engineers’ MO of perfecting the sound on the way in and printing the results for posterity.

Chopped Up Guitars

The complete run-down here of how producer John Porter achieved the hypnotic sounds on How Soon Is Now? shows just how far the effect can be taken in the right hands.

Gates can be used to re-create the sound above with highly controllable results. Not only can gate Range be used to regulate depth, but also tempo synced sounds are easily done using sidechain input from things like drums that weren’t recorded to a click. Applying delays to these sidechain sources can be used to design longer tremolo-like effects. A gate’s attack and release controls also allow precise ‘tremolo' waveshaping.

If you do decide to go old-school and use a guitar amplifier’s built in tremolo, the only way to get a truly tempo synced effect is to get the drummer to play to the guitar. Stereo tremolo can be simulated using delay which would work well on drone-type sounds such as in the example above.

Gating In The Box

As we all know, the use of hardware gating along with other processors and effects almost disappeared completely in studios with the arrival of the DAW.

Just like nearly every other industry on the planet, in the 21st century, the computer is now at the heart of everything audio engineers do. The mass-exodus into the box has made the idea of having a dedicated machine for each task unnecessary, and that includes our essential effects and processors such as gates.

Audio plugins rule modern mixing workflows. Yes, we can have pretty much as many audio plugins as we like, but gating and expanding are especially suited to happening in the box. Why? Because any arguments about how they sound are largely redundant. 99% of the time they happen as the first stage in processing chains, meaning that even those doing the mix externally can take advantage of gates and expanders in the box.

Truncated drum ambiences can now often be achieved in the reverb plugin itself; for more old-school control, bolting a virtual gate onto the end of it is trivially simple. Using an ultra-fast modern virtual expander, drum sounds can be completely transformed on a micro-second time scale for super-spiky vertical transients. Syncopated, complex gated effects across a synth can be done in the instrument on the timeline using edits, but increasingly there are tools that take things further such as Audiomodern’s Freezr.

If the jaw-dropping old-school effects that we talked about earlier on are so easy to achieve now, why are so few of them used today?

Invention Versus Convention

For certain signature sounds, their impact was so big that transplanting them into another song is just too conspicuous. Phil Collins’ “GA-GA—-GA-GA—-GA-GA—-GA-GA—-KAH–KAH!!’ belongs to one song only. The gated synth from Crazy could be borrowed for another mix but it would still be ‘that’ effect from another song. To use either in any other song might be a step too far.

So distinctive were the famous sounds from gates and expanders, that they are simply forever the property of the songs they enriched. We could go there with ease, but most of the time we choose not to.

There are trends in music production. In the 1970’s for many engineers a roll of gaffer tape and a healthy stock of towels, tissue and other snare drum furniture were essential for the sound of the time. Fast-forward to the 1990’s, and ‘pinginess’ was back in vogue for many. In the 2020’s the low-pitched, ‘splat’ snare sound is back once more.

It doesn’t matter if you’re using hardware or or software processing, the one thing that gear needs is an idea to put through it. It’s true that the seed of some studio gating tricks were found by accident. Other times an existing musical idea or aim drove how the gear was used and inspired inventive ways to get things done.

Have all ideas including tricks with gates all been done before? Possibly, but then again all inventions had an inventor or visionary who was unrestricted by what had already been done. Our studios now let us do whatever we want as long as we have the one thing that productions really need: Vision.