[LeMauce]

Originally Posted by psycho_monkey

Right about editing vocals, wrong about gates in general - so very, very wrong!

True, in the times of DAWs, you don't need to gate for noise in the same way. The OP should not be using a gate in the record or the mix stage - he should first minimise the noise in his room, then edit it out in the DAW when no vocals are happening.

This is (for me) the way to go whenever you need "hard gating" for noise. I edit toms in this way.

But..the comment re gates in studios only underlines a lack of experience/innovation I'm afraid!

Just a few uses:

sidechaining - eg for drums, I do things like keying a distorted mic on a snare off the clean mic - lets the distortion through on the snare but not triggered on cymbals etc.

Also can be used creatively eg listen to "dirge" by death in vegas - the end organ is gated and chopped by some sort of drum, possibly a HH figure.

dynamic shaping - look at an SSL, there's gates on every channel! just about every SSL based engineer will use them, not necessarily as hard gates but often in expander mode to shape the drum sound, bring down the spill between hits but not eliminate it.

noise - eg to mute compression or noisy FX units when not being used.

that's just a few uses - there's many many more.

+1 on all and +10 on the dynamic shaping, after knowing how to use the gates on a 4000G+ a world of new way of drum tracking opens to me.