Hello, everyone, it's @Phatstudio, And today on dynamic processor we will be looking at another interesting processor, Audio Gate. and if you missed our previous articles on dynamic processors you can check it out through the links at the end of this article.
A gate is a dynamic processing effect that controls the dynamic content of an audio track.It can be visualized as a door in front of a clubhouse which doesn't let in short people. This is exactly how you can visualize the work of an audio gate.
Gates acts like auto mute for the spell in between sounds.
For instance, let's take an example of an average drum recording, were we separately record all the elements of the drum kit. On the recording of the kick-drum, they will most likely be a spill from the snare-drum and on the snare-drum the will be some spill from the kick-drum etc..
The sound of the spill in between is a lot softer compared to the sound of the kick drum itself and of cause, we will love to have just the kick drum itself
Let's take an overview of some buttons and functions that you will find on most of the gate
As on most dynamic processor, on the gate, you will first start off by setting the Threshold. The threshold function, in this case, sets the level of which below the actually start working or gating if you will like to put it that way. Compare to that of the compressors way it normally works above the threshold, the gate works below the threshold.
As oppose to the compressor where we normally work with the ratio, the gate normally works with the range, and the range is a factor that can be set in dB. The range is the attenuation of signal peaks that are below the threshold. So you set the amount of decibel attenuation of the gate. So that will be the attenuation of the signals below the threshold. So what these basically does is that it makes sound below the threshold softer so we increase the dynamic range, which is simply the difference between the hardest sound and the softer sound.
N/B: That is basically what a gate does, and if we want to mute it we simply put the range in the highest settings. This could be up to 40 dB OR 70 dB, depending on the model that you have, sometimes it goes to infinity or something like that. Which it means that every signal that gets below the threshold will be attenuated with 70 dB basically making as good as silent.
****The next function determines the speed of the gates and this is the attack, hold, and release time which is normally set in mill-seconds****.
Looking at this from a closed gate perspective, imagine that the gate is closed so it won't let through any sound unit the sound reaches the threshold and that's the way the attack time kicks in and how fast will the gate open. so basically if we have a slow attack time on the snare, we remove that trenching sound which is the attack part of the snare. A gate which is set too slow will give the impression of a feed-in basically.
HOLD-TIME,
When the attack time is passed we approach the hold time, which is simply the time that the gate will remain open
THE RELEASE TIME,
The release time is the time it takes for the gate to close again, which will be the feed-out
N/B: We open up the gate with the attack time and it stays open for the duration of the hold time and after this, we have the release time which is the feed-out time.
So basically we have the feed-in, stay-open, and feed-out if we are looking at the Attack, Hold and Release
So gates actually offer two threshold, which allows you to set the point at which you would want the gate to close rather than a time.
Setting the attack and the release time is actually going to set the shape of the sound by adding an ADSR unto the sound
N/B: Gates also has a key input they can receive a different signal to trigger the gate with.
Knowing how gate works is very useful especially if you are working on a project. By knowing the basics and being able to implement each of these functions, you will be able to create the sounds you are looking for.
Once again this was @Phatstudio, And as always you are encouraged to send in your questions and suggestions through comments and I will do my best to attend to them.
You can check out our previous post on dynamic processors through these links: REF1, REF2, REF3, REF4, REF5
