Perfect Gating

Hi there. My name is Jocelyn Bouchard. I live in Quebec city, Canada. I have a 24 tracks (16 analog and 8 on hard disk) home studio. I'm pretty much involved in music composition and equaly in computer programing.

Today, I would like to share with you a trick I use for acheiving what I call the " perfect gate ". To do it with succes, you need:

1) A sequencer running on a computer, slave synced to your multitrack
2) A trigger-to-MIDI device, such as the Alesis D4 drum module.
3) A MIDI mute automation console.

The goal is to have the sequecer un-mute your console's mutes 1 or 2 milliseconds BEFORE each sound happens on an audio track, and then re-mute it right after the sound has fade out. This gives a perfect noise gate in the sense that absolutly no transients are lost. It works best on drums and other sounds with fast decay.

Here is how to do:

1) Record a SMPTE track on your multitrack recorder.
2) Record the entire drum session on the multitrack recorder.
3) Sync slave your sequencer (I use Cakewalk) to the SMPTE track on the multitrack recorder.
4) Run the desired multitrack outputs to the trigger inputs on your trigger-to-MIDI device
5) Plug the MIDI OUT of the trigger-to-MIDI device to the MIDI IN of the sequencer
6) Start recording on the sequencer
7) Press play on the multitrack machine and let the entire song play, then stop both machines
8) You now have a MIDI track that contains the exact timing for start and duration of every notes recorded on your mutltitrack. The MIDI events are probably of the NOTE ONs and NOTE OFFs type.
9) edit every NOTE ON event and change it to the MIDI event corresponding to the UN-MUTE MIDI commande on your console.
10) edit every NOTE OFF event and change it to the MIDI event corresponding to the MUTE MIDI commande on your console.
11) Change the starting time of every UN-MUTE event so it will happend some milliseconds AHEAD (before) it's original time.
12) You're done! Play the sequencer synced to the multitrack recorder and the console will let the sound pass only when there is a signal on the tape.

Notes:
The steps 9,10 and 11 are long tasks. Use your sequencer's macro capabilities to automate the process. I wrote Cakewalk CAL macros that do the job usefully.
For sure, you'll need to do some adjustements. For example, you'll have to adjust thresholds on your trigger-to-MIDI device. You may also have to adjust for false trigering. I also wrote a CAL routine that intercepts false triggers, based on the duration of the MIDI event. Very short duration triggers are deleted.
I hope this idea will help you in acheiving cleaner mixes.

If you want to read more on the subject, EMail me at job@amadeus.qc.ca