A gate has a lot of practical applications in your mix. In its simplest form, you can use it to clean up your mix by eliminating low(er) level bleed from other instruments or the environment. One common application to that end is to gate your drums to remove bleed from say your kick drum. We can also use a gate’s sidechain function to achieve a number of results and effects in our mix, like supplementing the body of our kick via a sine wave. With that in mind, let’s cover how to sidechain a gate in your mix.
How to Sidechain a Gate
Different gates (not to mention DAWs) have different ways to access their sidechain parameters.
In my Ableton Live, you need to tick the arrow in the top left section of the plugin to access the sidechain capabilities.
From there, you need to select the source from the drop-down list which you want to control the gate’s behavior:
With this gate, I selected the “Kick” track. Now whatever track my gate is on will be controlled by the volume and dynamic behavior of my kick drum.
One very practical application of sidechain gate use is to do exactly what I referenced in opening, or beefing up your kick with a sine wave.
As I covered in my overview of the sine wave kick drum trick, a low frequency sine wave perfectly mimics the sound of the body of a kick.
If your kick recording is weak and top heavy due to poor equipment or poor miking (see how to mic a kick drum), then supplementing it with a sine wave is an easy fix:
This fix simply entails creating one long and low frequency sine wave note which plays throughout the entire mix. A C2 note (which in Ableton is actually C1) works well as it’s roughly 65Hz – a perfect frequency right in the “thud” of that kick drum.
While the note is technically constantly playing, we only hear it when the gate opens, and the gate only opens for the split second when the kick drum triggers.
You’ll see that the gate has parameters very similar to a compressor (attack, hold, release, threshold, etc.)
Just bear in mind that these parameters are all tied to the audio of the kick drum and not the sine wave (in this particular example).
We need to set the threshold accordingly then so that it’s just picking up the peak of the quietest instance of the kick in the performance. I like to find that quietest moment (just glancing at the smallest peak on the wave form for the kick works well), then set the threshold maybe 5 dB beneath that.
This ensures that whenever that kick triggers, our gate will simultaneously open and play that sine wave for the duration of the kick, then instantly closing up again once the kick is no longer triggering to silence that sine wave.
I like a moderate attack time so that we don’t hear the gate opening, plus it gives time for the kick’s transient punch to come through unchallenged. A release of 15ms closes that gate up quickly enough once the threshold is no longer met by the actual kick, but no so fast that you hear an artifact.
Depending on what you’re sidechaining your gate to, you will need to adjust these parameters to ensure you get the benefit of the gate without any unwanted artifacts.
But there you go, you can now sidechain gates on tracks to other sources to control the behavior of the gate like the example I just shared.
