If you use a longer attack time than that, the gate might not open in time to let your dialog through it will apply an audible fade to the beginning of your audio content. You should use a relatively fast attack time in the neighborhood of 1-5 ms. Your gate's attack value dictates the amount of time it takes for the gate to open and allow sound to pass through. When signal breaches the threshold level, the gate opens. In that case, you'll simply input the amount of attenuation that you'd like the gate to apply as a decibel value.īy default, a gate is closed and is constantly applying gain reduction. Aim for noise reduction as opposed to noise removal.ĭepending on the gate that you're using, you may be provided with a floor control as opposed to a ratio control. However, you should reduce your ratio value to 10:1 or 4:1 for a more natural sound once you've found an attack value, release value, and threshold value that work - we'll look at these settings in a moment. Using an extreme ratio value of 100:1 is actually a good idea when dialing in your settings it will let you clearly hear the gain reduction applied. The issue with doing this is that your audio will start to sound choppy because of the aggressive gain reduction being applied. Most novice gate users try to completely remove background noise using an extreme ratio value like 100:1, which results in near-silence. Use a Ratio of 4:1 or 10:1Ī gate's ratio value determines how heavily your audio signal will be attenuated when it breaches the gate's threshold level. Although, as long as you sufficiently reduce the level of quiet audio material using a gate, you don't need to worry about undoing the noise reduction you've applied. When you compress a signal and apply makeup gain, it will increase the level of the noise floor. To avoid this problem, apply a gate to your audio before applying a compressor. It provides six different gating algorithms, a few advanced controls that allow you to fine-tune the way in which processing is applied, and a sidechain feature that you can use to create interesting rhythmic pumping effects.įigure 3: A gate processing incoming audio prior to a compressor. Sometimes, want to slightly tweak the level of breaths and adjust their length so they sound time-aligned and natural. The breaths that exist within a vocal performance are often desirable and can add to the groove of a song. Most songs aren't more than 3 minutes long the amount of editing required to manually clean up a vocal recording is minimal and the results are worth it. You'll always be able to achieve cleaner results by cutting and fading the edges of audio clips. I don't recommend using a gate to clean up studio vocals when producing music. However, you can use a hardware gate - or plugin gate if you're running your audio through a DAW - to tame background noise. If you're performing in front of an audience, you don't have the opportunity to manually edit your audio. Slapping a gate onto your dialog and tweaking a few settings is a quick workaround.Īnother instance of when you may want to use a gate is in a live context. Manually cutting out low-level sounds in a DAW can be incredibly time consuming if you're working on a 1-2 hour podcast. For long audio recordings, such as podcast episodes, many people choose to attenuate breaths between dialog using a gate. You should only use a gate when you're looking for a quick and dirty way to deal with background noise that's present between audio content.
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