A noise gate is extremely useful for cleaning up your recordings by filtering out background noise or bleed from other instruments. This allows you to just process the audio that you want with subsequent effects like EQ and compression, not to mention it yields a much cleaner mix overall. You can also use a noise gate for some interesting aesthetic effects like gated reverb. Let’s talk how to use a noise gate.
How to Use a Noise Gate
As I identified in my overview of what is a noise gate, this is a specific volume based effect/plugin which silences your track unless a certain threshold or level of volume is met:
The threshold is the key component here; this determines when the gate “opens”, thus allowing that track to play like it normally would without the plugin.
Setting the threshold to -10dB means that if the audio doesn’t peak at at least -10dB at some point, the gate stays closed and the track will effectively stay muted.
If any point of the track exceeds -10dB, the gate will open and the audio will be heard as normal. There are other parameters aside from the threshold, most of which determine how quickly or better said transparently the gate opens and closes.
Noise Removal
Most of the time, you want to set your noise gate’s threshold to just a little below the quietest PRACTICAL instance of your audio on that track.
This is certainly the case when you want to remove background noise like the fan of your computer, air conditioner, etc.
When I say “quietest practice instance”, I mean you set this to below the quietest vocal, guitar part, etc. that you want to be audible to ensure that nothing that you want gets filtered out.
By the same token, this ensures that gate stays closed whenever audio is not playing, keeping that track quiet.
Speaking of vocals, this graphic taken from my overview on the best noise gate settings for vocals demonstrates the other settings in how to use a noise gate without tipping to the listener that you’re using a gate:
As you can see, a very quick attack paired with a slower release is a good combo for transparently opening and closing the gate when the threshold is met and after the level dips below it again, respectively.
Replicating these settings along with the aforementioned method of setting the threshold works well when you want to remove room noise, outside noise, or simply any unwanted noise picked up via a microphone or electrical noise.
Gated Drums
You can also use gates to remove bleed from other drums like on your kick or snare so that any processing you add to those elements of the kits won’t also be applied to noise unnecessarily, exacerbating those problems.
You can see in the example below I’m using a gate to clean up my kick, removing audio bleed created by the rest of the kit:
I cover how to do this in full in my tutorial on how to gate drums, so refer to that if you’ve tracked live drums and want to ensure you’ve got the cleanest kick, snare, toms, etc. to process via effective gating.
Gated Reverb
Speaking of drums, you can also use a gate to specifically control a reverb on your snare. Gated reverb has been a popular technique ever since it was accidentally discovered in the early 80’s.
Essentially you have a reverb tied to that snare, but it only plays when the snare is playing via a gate.
The result is that the tail is cut off completely when the snare stops playing, keeping that reverb synced to your drum. This creates a very tight reverb which makes the snare sound huge while keeping it much cleaner than letting that reverb’s tail decay naturally:
Check out my tutorial on gated reverb for drums for the specific process in using it in your own mix.
As you can see, gates have a number of applications for ultimately cleaning up or controlling elements of your mix.
They’re excellent at their most simplified and practical purpose to simply remove noise when the intended audio isn’t playing, saving you time in having to painstakingly trim your audio.
They’re also great at filtering out bleed from other instruments you simultaneously recorded and don’t want included in any other processing you’ll have on that track.
You can also use it to control other effects or parameters in your audio to keep things tight.
Think outside the box when it comes to implementing gates in your mix, sidechaining it on a track to another track to get interesting effects, etc.
As with many aspects of mixing, your imagination in how you use it is the only real limitation!
