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Lets Talk Gates

N

Nyarlathotep

Inactive
Feb 5, 2006
8,987
10
43
West Coast of Canada
www.soundclick.com
#1
aluminium-entrance-gate-125862.jpg






Seriously tho. I still haven't decided on a gate for the setup that is currently a WIP. Im basically looking for a gate to "make" the various fuzzes into gated ones.

I use to own an NS-2, but im not sure if I should use one with a loop or not. I guess im looking for one with some real "chop" when it opens/closes.
 
#3
I don't think it works that way. Gated fuzz pedals have the gate somewhere in between the circuit, not before or after. As always, I could be wrong, but I've got a Fuzz Factory, (gated), and the control is in the center of the circuit.
 
#4
I believe that this is probably correct. I'm not sure an external gate is what you're looking for...I have a few and they're really great for things like vocal mics and drum mics, or if you've got a very noisy signal chain that you need to tame.
 
#9
I have a similar issue with my line...I'm running a Pigtronix OFO as the grit and the 'Octava' section does what I need to gate my sound (it doesn't track low signal or finger sounds...and sounds gated) but when I turn it off, it's back to good ol' snarly loud fuzz and drive.

Very amazing pedal...but I've thought about the same thing.
 
#10
RickenBoogie said:
I don't think it works that way. Gated fuzz pedals have the gate somewhere in between the circuit, not before or after. As always, I could be wrong, but I've got a Fuzz Factory, (gated), and the control is in the center of the circuit.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't the trigger have to be at the begginning, before the fuzz compresses the signal (in its own way)? After that, it shouldn't matter where in the chain the break (or volume drop, whatever) gets introduced, should it?

kevteop said:
IME adding an external gate to a favourite fuzz won't give you a gated fuzz effect, they're just not fast enough, and if you use aggressive settings it gets messy.
Click to expand...

Not fast enough? Messy? Im more interested in how it would make things messy....
 
#11
Ashly makes the best gates I have tried, but they are rackmount. The TCE Nova Dynamics has a pretty good gate, but that's a lot of pedal just for one function. Most of the others I've tried are so terrible it's unbelievable.
 
#12
Nyarlathotep said:
Not fast enough? Messy? Im more interested in how it would make things messy....
Click to expand...

Gated fuzz pedals chop the ends of your notes really neatly. Noise gates often don't, so you'll get either noise around the end of your notes or have your notes gate while they're barely done decaying, etc.

Maybe there are gates out there that could do this job, but I imagine you could buy several gated fuzz pedals for the same money. :)
 
#14
Following up on this thread in case anyone has additional comments.

I have a Brown Dog that I really like. It gates pretty well, though does let a little fizzle through sometimes on note decay. Probably a technique issue more than pedal issue for that specific "problem". But sounds balls out awesome with my BassIQ and is overall really tight and clean. Way over priced, but that's a different thread. ;)

Anyway, I'm have other gating needs beyond built into a bass fuzz. So I'm researching separate gates. Either floor/pedal or 1U racks. I'm hoping to find something that can provide a really hard, fast chop/gate to the end of my notes to give me some industrial sounding sampled effect to my playing. I have a Rane DC24 rack unit that has a gate, but it's slow and lacks any type of good response time control. I've read the Alesis 3630 can be used for fast and hard gating, though the compressor portion usually gets panned. Unsure on the standard MXR and ISP gate pedals, they only have a threshold knob so it'd probably depend on how fast they truly are.

I also considered some type of momentary off switch/button added to my instrument or as a stomp. I think the BOSS NS-2 set to Mute can do that, though I haven't personally experimented with one yet.

Basically I want the exact opposite of what your typical gate user likely wants which is something invisible to simply kill noise and hiss during quiet interludes. Instead I want a gate to provide instant and hard, but automatic, mute. I'd experiment with throwing it after all my dirt boxes but before filters, and right in the amp effects loop to see how it does killing the entire chain.

Anything come to mind?
 
#16
On the extreme side of gates a recording engineer friend of mine suggested the 1U sized DBX 172 aptly named SUPER GATE. Used heavily on percussion apparently, but has a lot of interesting gate specific features. Hard to find used, but goes for $150-$200 from what I can tell. It's line level only, and only XLR in/outs, so it'd have to be in the effects loop and use some adapters or XLR-to-1/4 cabling.
 

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