Gate look ahead without having a look ahead

Vigo

Member
So i just came across this idea the other day since i have no look ahead gate available.

What I did is that i doubled my kick track and used sidechain on the main gate of the main track.

I then went to my double and lowered the volume to -infinite, used a pre-send as the main gate's sidechain-trigger.

I gated my second track normally and then just placed the second track's recording a little bit before my main track so what i ended up with
was a fake look ahead comming from my second track this way i get the whole kick sound.

This way i really could cut some bleed from my kick that had about every other instruments in it like crasy (live recording).

There's no real question in that, just i figured this out as cheating a "look ahead gate", hope this helps somebody. If the post is irrelevent just delete it no prob.


What do you guys think of that way of gating?
 
I think it's a pretty ingenious idea and workaround. I don't have much experience with kick mics, but is there a better placement to use so that it doesn't pick up so much bleed from everything else?
 
I think it's a pretty ingenious idea and workaround. I don't have much experience with kick mics, but is there a better placement to use so that it doesn't pick up so much bleed from everything else?

Didn't record the set myself but yes probly there are more effective ways such as using plexies to block bass or such
 
I can't remember which video it is, but the Youtube channel SpectreSoundStudios had something similar, but for the snare drum. (I'd assume this could be done for kick as well, I've never messed with it though)

What he did was use a drum trigger on his snare to capture the signal instead of a double.
 
I can't remember which video it is, but the Youtube channel SpectreSoundStudios had something similar, but for the snare drum. (I'd assume this could be done for kick as well, I've never messed with it though)

What he did was use a drum trigger on his snare to capture the signal instead of a double.

Definitively will take a look at that, thanks for info.
 
It's great that you figured this out and it worked for you. Not to take anything away from you, but this is not a particularly new technique. It's not common, but is well-established both with gates and compressor/limiters. Probably should have been in that side-chaining thread before it went weird.
 
This is how we were taught to do it at my audio school. I think this MIGHT have been how they did it back in the day when they didn't have look ahead? Not sure.

If it was on analog tape, they probably would've had to do some fancy trick to make that work, but yeah, that's how you can do a work around for using a gate that doesn't come equipped with look ahead functionality.
 
This is how we were taught to do it at my audio school. I think this MIGHT have been how they did it back in the day when they didn't have look ahead? Not sure.

If it was on analog tape, they probably would've had to do some fancy trick to make that work, but yeah, that's how you can do a work around for using a gate that doesn't come equipped with look ahead functionality.

They probably did it by monitoring off the record head
 
When I had my da-88 tape.decks, I would take the kick track (for example) and set it so that track was a few ms early. (You could do that with those decks) Then I would insert the gate and a delay set to the same ms that the deck was set to.

Sometimes I would have to split the signal to put an eq in the sidechain... it is so much easier not having to deal with hardware, cables and patchbays.
 
For any Cubase users who haven't been doing this - it's a good use for the delay/offset in the channel inspector (since you can set negative delay values). Duplicate the track, offset one backwards a few ms using the channel controls.
It's a lot easier than moving things by eye - and you can match it to the gate's attack time for super-precise triggering.
 
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