Week 4 assignment

The Gate

Hello fellow Courserians,
I’m Mircea Oculenu, from Bucharest, Romania, doing the week 4 assignment for Coursera’s Introduction to Music Production.

I chose a very useful tool that we use in all sorts of situations  - both studio and live environments. And yes, it’s about The Gate – or more appropriate, Noise Gate. What the Noise Gate does is simply letting pass a signal only if it's above a trehsold and below the ''musical signal'' but it should be used with much care. Basically I’ll try to explain the use of gate in the guitar department J but that’s very similar to the use for voices or drums etc..  As a guitar player you are used to having some noise somewhere along the chain. A cable, the hiss from you amp or the poor used effect will ad to the amount of noise you’re hearing. Any guitarist will raise the ‘’Drive’’ value on his/ her amplifier and that’s usually when the hiss will become more apparent. Thing is that with all this noise/ hiss, when the guitar player hits a chord the signal becomes much more powerfull and will ‘’mask’’ the hiss.  That’s where the gate makes it’s entrance.  Because with a gate you can set a threshold somewhere above the level of the noise itself and bellow the signal of the guitar – that the range of gating. Setting this threshold means expiramenting, because setting it too high will also cut into material you want it be heard. Of course u can use it creatively, experiment with what you hear but, for now, I’d like to show you how I’d use it if, for some reason, I have a guitar recording with a bit of noise.

First let’s see what the gate does to another signal – an electric piano -. Modifying the threshold you can hear that, if pushed too far, the gate begans to take out some of the useful, musical sounds too J.

Let’s hear the guitar now, without a gate – it’s bypassed,  and in the second part with slightly different settings of the gate:

As you noticed, when enabled the gate silenced the 2,3 seconds when the guitar didn't produce a chord , 2,3 seconds that you could hear when the gate was not enabled - hiss and a bit of electrical noise. 

You can also use the gate to remove some unwanted parts of your playing - notes touched by mistake etc..

Thank you for your time and understanding!