NOISE GATE
Basically a noise gate reduces the volume of the audio when it drops below a certain level and then raises it back up when the volume of the audio increaces.
What is it used for?
Let's say you're recording a track of lead guitar, there's a main solo part and some little adlib leads here and there in the track. Overall the guitarist only plays part of the time and the rest of the time when he's not playing you are basically recording the buzzing and humming coming from the guitar amplifier. You can use a noise gate here to shut the volume off whenever the guitarist is not actually playing thus eliminating the amp buzz.
How does it work?
Well most gates have the same sort of settings. The threshold setting allws you to select the point at which the gate steps in and turns the volume down. You want to adjust this volume until you hear the guitar when it plays. If you are hearing the buzz then you have set the threshold too low and you need to raise it until the noise is effectively muted. The attack setting sets how fast the gate reacts to the changes in volume. The decay setting allows you select how long the gate takes to close.
Common uses for noise gates
The most common use for noise gates is gating the individual drum tracks. Let's say you want to apply a reverb on the snare drum but not the rest of the kit. You could use a noise gate on the snare mic track to isolate the sound of the snare drum from all the other sounds that will always leak into the snare drum mic. Once you have the sanre drum isolated on that track you can apply whatever effects you'd like and they will only effect your snare drum. You can also do this with the kick drum and the toms. Overhead drum mics are usually best left ungated, especially if you haven't got any room mics recorded.
Other noise gate options
There are a couple of other things you will find on many noise gate plugins, one of these is called key, and another is usually labeled frequency. The key allows you to select another track that the noise gate will "listen to" in order to open and close the gate. The freqency setting allows you to choose a specific part of the audio spectrum for the gate to listen to. For expample, let's say you've recorded the entire drum kit with just one microphone. You've got a good representation of the whole kit but you want more control of the individual sounds. You could try making a few copies of this track. In the first one you key the gate to listen to 80Hz which would isolate the kick drum. On the second copy you would key the gate to listen to 1Khz to isolate the sanre drum. You can then deal with the isloated kick and snare independently from each other. This is no substitute for getting more microphones on the drum kit, but it will give you more flexibility in your mix.
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