Okay, on to noise gates or just call them gates from now on. Now to help you kind of understand what noise gates do, I set up a little experiment here with this desktop fan here, let me just turn on. So you can hear that far out now. Now, if I keep on you notice it's not that loud, but if I stop talking, you can really hear it right? If I keep on talking and just keep on talking and keep on talking while I'm talking to you, you really can't hear the fan because the sound of my voice is masking out the fan but as soon as I stopped talking, and it's clear there's a fan fan in the room. This is the noise in the bad stuff.

It might be hum and buzz on your guitar line. It could be a bunch of things. But in this analogy here, I have a microphone it's a little shotgun microphone is out out of the the shot right now. This microphone is coming down this channel right here. And this is representing the noise. What about every time I stopped talking, I just brought this fader down.

This is basically what a noise get is doing. So I'm talking and blah, blah, blah, you really can't hear the fan but as soon as I stopped, and then I bring it back up when I speak. So that's really what a noise gate does. Okay, we're going to work on the same noisy guitar amp that we heard in one of the slides a little bit before. Here's what it sounds like. That's loud, right?

And if you look up here, and you see the level of just the noise, it's pretty loud. I would say it's just a little over minus 20 db. And so here's what we're going to do. I'm actually By the way, I'm in reason Another da W, you're probably familiar with my propellerhead, great little complete digital audio workstation, really love this, this guy. So instead of just doing this in pro tool, or Tom, I thought I'd mix it up and kind of show you some other stuff here. What's nice about the reason mixer is it has a noise gate, and compressor built right in, and here are at gate controls.

Now you'll notice that we still have detection and gain reduction is the same thing. We can simply get away from this thing. All of these dynamic controls have their detection, which is the threshold right here, and then the gain reduction of like, how much do you want to reduce the range? So like I said before, if I go back down to the bottom here and look right here, right at the beginning, it's, it looks like it's probably around 24 You're minus 24 is about how loud that is. So therefore, if I go up here to the gate controls this channel, and I set the gate threshold at about, say 2625 like that, then it probably won't be reducing this until I bring that threshold up a little bit more. I yeah, it's that net killer.

So obviously, if I sit that way up here, then nothing will get through all of these these guitar core things like that list. In fact, try that. And you can see it's basically killing the entire volume. That's because the range is set to just, you know, basically take it's not killing everything. It's pulling everything down. Can you see that?

Just the right. Can See that? tooltip Yeah, it's taken. down to 40 db, which is not completely muting it, but it's taking it down a whole lot, right? So if I was to set this to around, say minus 20 db, that would mean that these guys here are not loud enough to get past the gate but these Guitar Chords will be let's have a listen to that. That's working really, really well.

Now what are some of the other controls you'll see on here are the range you don't have to completely kill the level but what if you said you know what, just pull it down. In other words, anytime it's below this threshold, this threshold is probably set about here. No, don't completely kill it, but just pull it down by say four 10 db, that would help. So in a mix, pulling this noise down by 14 Db is certainly a lot better than not pulling it down at all. Sometimes you might just want to kill it and pull it completely out. But if it starts sounding a little unnatural, then might what you might want to do is just, instead of it being just a completely closed gate, like I said, it's not complete in this case, some will allow you to completely mute the sound.

Well, in this case, this pulls that a maximum down of, say 40 db. So if it starts sounding a little too unnatural, you can play with this range, and then just have it pull it down by a certain amount like say, minus 20 or something like that. Now much like a compressor, you then have the ability to adjust the amount of gain reduction. A gate can be just like a real gate and just cut air. everything out or you can have it just reduce the level a bit so it's not quite as abrupt. Let's see an example with drums.

Okay, I'm back in reason. And we have a bunch of drum tracks kick, snare hat, for Toms and overhead left and overhead, right, which I should pan all the way out to the left and all the way out to the right. doesn't really need it for this example. That's just the way I want to see something like that. I just want to kind of fix it. Anyway, I digress.

Let's saw the kick drum. Now this is just the kick drum challenge. We should just be hearing just the kick drum right. But as you can hear, it's not a magic microphone. While a lot of microphones that we would normally put a kick drum like an AKG d 12 or 20 s like that, the cardioid mics in that they pick up on what's right next to them and they reject a lot of the other sounds However, like I said, there's not a magic microphone, they will pick up other sounds at a reduced level. So you can hear the side stick there, you might hear some, some bleed from some from some other drum thing like that.

So what can we do about that gets to the rescue. And like we've said before, you can see the gates we're at the top here. So I've got the first kick drum track soloed. Let's turn on the gates. And let's make the range really savage minus 40, which is almost like muting everything, and we'll play around with the threshold. Obviously, if you set the threshold too aggressively, even the loud kick drums won't get through.

So let's mess around with that until the kick drum starts to just pop its head through Let's get this stuff passed. Now there's a problem. It's certainly very clean. But you will notice that there are some leading kick drum notes like a bone. On bone, whether you're original, whether we're the leading kick drum hit is not as hard as the second one. So if you get too aggressive with this stuff, you know, I see a lot of people who just really try to just isolate every single thing.

And that's not a really it's not a winning proposition because there's lots of very small city on snare drums you have roughs and, and just little grace notes that won't make their way through there. So let's be a little less aggressive with that. Okay, so now it's getting through. But all those other nights, check him out. The bypass. Here's how the snare drum is getting through.

Now magically, no snare drum. And also, when you hear, you can hear a crash cymbal coming through, every now and again, let me just be quiet. So we hear that you're that crash there. Now if we change the release there, we can get a really tight budget here. We've got some new problems. I can hear a little clicking there.

Also, it's a little unnatural. So I'll start raising that up. Just raise up the threshold bit that might work out well. Let's go over to the snare drum now. I think we're in a part of the song where there's no snare drums. Okay, so there you go.

Okay, so now it's time to come through. Again, quick release. Yeah, I mean, that might work well, a really quick release and just a side stick, because there's really no such thing the size stick, but in a snare drum, you want to have a little longer release there because that there's that natural release of a snare drum. So let me just play around with that just sounds too unnatural. And also, many Maybe not completely killer. So you can see the range now you can hear some of the overheads coming in.

So rather than just going absolutely crazy with just killing anything that doesn't make it through the gate, maybe just experiment with something like this where you're just reducing it by, I don't know say 10 or 12 Db here at the top so I'm going to go carefully through all of these. Tom's are a great example of this because if say a tom is only a Tom, Phil you know every 16 measures or something like that, with a carefully set gate on some of these Tom mics here, so They only open when you know the time is actually hit, then you can really reduce a lot of bleed. And why do I say that because we have four Tom mics here. So if you can set all of them really well just solo them out and make sure that the Tom comes through but everything else is, you know, even if it's not completely cut out like a gate, even if it's just reduced a little bit, tell you what bleed for mics like this can really really build up.

So now you know exactly what gates do. Here are the application of noise gates. Noisy guitar amps are probably the first one I can think of. Also, drum lines are too because the close proximity of each drum to each other. That's hard for a mic that's focused right on the snare drum. They're not to pick up the Hi Hat right next to it.

If you adjust the threshold of each mic down to only let the loudest signal through. That's the source. You know that that microphone is actually focused on, then you can cut down the bleed down that line that other things. You know, think of it this way, if your snare mic is picking up all the other drums as well, when you try to EQ or affect anything on that channel, you're affecting much more than just the drum sound. If you adjust that threshold, so the only the loudest snare hits get through, then you will zero in on just that sound and get a cleaner mix. And by the way, your mic selection will play a big part.

Here too, you want to use cardioid mics with tight pickup pattern. So the mics reject many other drums as well. And also by the way, you don't have to completely close that gate. Underneath the threshold, you can just pull it down say I don't know like six to 10 DBS just to give you a little bit more natural sound we'll look at actually uses of this of the gates later on in the dynamics in action segment.