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@maru shared this effect so you can build on it and use it in your DAW.

AvailableEffect

Gate

A noise gate with a clear threshold.

About

A stereo noise gate. It mutes the signal whenever it falls below a threshold, so hiss, hum and spill between phrases disappear while the notes you played come through.

Controls

  • Threshold (−100 to 0 dB, default −40 dB) is the level the signal has to clear before anything gets through. Set it just above the noise floor and below the quietest note you care about. Around −60 dB only catches true silence; above about −12 dB a normal mix breaks into fragments.
  • Smoothing (5 to 500 ms, default 50 ms) is how long the gate takes to open and close. Short settings keep transients and leave clean silence between hits, but can chatter on notes that hover near the threshold. Long settings fade in and out smoothly and soften attacks.
  • Mix (default 100%) blends the gated sound with the untouched one. Below 100% the gate becomes a gentle expander: quiet passages are turned down rather than silenced.

The threshold fader shows the setting, not the incoming level. Left and right are gated separately, each on its own level.

Getting started

Gate is an audio effect. It is most useful on material with gaps and a noise floor, such as a guitar take or a vocal: listen to the spaces between phrases, not the notes. The presets are starting points, since the right threshold depends on the source:

  • Noise Floor removes hiss between phrases and nothing else.
  • Tight Drums opens and closes fast, so hits survive and tails are cut.
  • Expander is half wet and forgiving on sounds with a natural decay.
  • Stutter lets only the loudest peaks through.
  • Soft Swell fades in and out instead of switching.
  • Default is a moderate threshold with a gentle transition.

Expect to move Threshold after loading any of them.

Limits

There are no separate attack, hold or release controls and no sidechain input.

How it works.

An envelope follower measures the signal's amplitude, and that measurement is compared against the threshold. Above it the gate is open and audio passes; below it the gate closes and the output is silence. It is not a filter and it removes nothing from inside a note, it only decides, moment to moment, whether there is a note at all.

Smoothing is the follower's time constant, and it is the one control that decides whether this sounds like a gate or like a fault. Because the same constant governs opening and closing, a setting fast enough to catch a transient is also fast enough to chatter when the signal sits near the threshold, and a setting slow enough to be smooth will let the tail of a note through the gap after it.

The browser preview builds this from four plain nodes and no worklet. A waveshaper rectifies the input, a one-pole lowpass whose cutoff is 1/(2·pi·Smoothing) averages it into an envelope, a second waveshaper maps that envelope through a soft-knee curve, 0 well below the threshold, 1 well above, a smooth ramp across the boundary, and the result is summed into a gain node's parameter. The VCA's own gain sits at zero, so the follower is the only thing that ever opens it.

The knee is what makes this usable rather than a switch, and it is deliberately not a separate control. A hard comparator chatters whenever the signal hovers at the threshold, so the curve ramps across a small band either side of it and the follower's own smoothing does the rest. Everything is audio-rate, which is the part a polling meter cannot do: the gate reacts within a sample of the transient rather than at the next animation frame.

What would you make with Gate?

Describe what you want to make. Build it with the Studio agent.

Goes well with.

Building block

Squeeze

A compressor with visible gain reduction.

Prototype

FX Mini

Drive, tone, and bounded feedback delay.