Tightening multitracked guitar rythems with a Noise Gate

[BBad199]

I have heard of a technique to tighten heavy tracked guitar parts with a linked gate by using a single source to trigger the gate for all the other tracks. My problem is I don't know how to do this with the gear that I have. How do a run a stereo sub mix into the gate but only control the gate with a single track?

My assets include various pluggin gates with Cubase SX and a TC G-major external noise gate.

Thanks in advance.

 

[bennychico11]

i'm not sure if the plugins you have are able to do it because I'm not familiar with Cubase, but the technique you're asking about is called Keying a gate. look for that term in a help menu or in the plugin. what happens is when the kick drum, for example, hits it's note at a loud enough volume it triggers the gate on the bass channel. this can help make a bass line more solid if you have a bass player who isn't playing in rhythm or you want the bass drum and the bass line to be the same. Another cool technique you can use with a key is the kick drum keying a gate that contains an oscillator track. It can sound pretty cool.

 

[Farview]

From what I remember the g-major is a guitar processor. in order to do this you would need a real live rack mount gate. not a compressor with an expander/gate, not a 3630, a gate. (with a key insert) The other thing you could do is have the guitar players play it tightly. Or edit the guitar parts in your daw.

 

[BBad199]

Well I am the guitar player for now, =). I know my own limitations and I would say that I'm a pretty tight guitar tracker. Its still physically impossible to get any punch out of 3 tracks left and 3 tracks right which is why I considered a gate with a tight grip on a source signal to gate my other tracks.

Is there a way to do this using pluggins and sends to the master bus if I split the stereo signal (used left to the gate and right for the grouped secondary tracks?)

 

[Farview]

You would hve to group the tracks together and just edit them by hand. (like you would taking the stick click count in off the begining of the song)
You have 6 guitar tracks? Are they all doing the same thing? If so, it will eventually make the sound smaller.

 

[andyskinner]

Guitar Sound

I rekkon the guitar sound can have a lot to do with it aswell, if you`ve got a tight punchy sound I wouldn`t think you`d have many problems?

Andy.

 

[lonelyparis]

i'm not sure if the plugins you have are able to do it because I'm not familiar with Cubase, but the technique you're asking about is called Keying a gate. look for that term in a help menu or in the plugin. what happens is when the kick drum, for example, hits it's note at a loud enough volume it triggers the gate on the bass channel. this can help make a bass line more solid if you have a bass player who isn't playing in rhythm or you want the bass drum and the bass line to be the same. Another cool technique you can use with a key is the kick drum keying a gate that contains an oscillator track. It can sound pretty cool.

Isn't this called a side chain?