Tired of unwanted noises? An Introduction to Noise Gating!

Hello,

After reading a lot of posts here on YTC I have seen that a lot of people are have had troubles when recording because the microphones are so senstive. Well, I have the solution to your problems and it will be shown with pictures and everything to give you an idea on how this works.

Basically, what we're gonna work with is a virtual effect called Noise Gate and it's purpose is to open and close the gate if the signal is under a certain treshold. I found a noise gate just now that you all can use. I don't have much experience with it since I've used my hardware gate pretty much all the time so haven't had any use for software gates. But I got it to work pretty good so I will use that software in this tutorial. First of all, this is a VST application so I'm not sure if this will work on AudaCity, unless it has gotten VST support since the last time I used it.

the fish fillets
In the fish fillets package ou get an de-esser, compressor and a gate. You will have to download them all unless you have a mac, but I will only focus on the noise gate at this point.

Download:
http://www.digitalfishphones.com/binaries/the_fish_fillets_v1_1.zip

Well, you probably knows how to install it? But your DAW should have a VST folder for you to put all the library's in and then you need to find it in your list of effects afterwards.

Alright, so you have now done a recording and you have added the FLOORFISH as the noise gate is called as an effect on the track where you need noise removed. It should look something like this.

Spoiler:

Now on this picture you can see that I have the FLOORFISH noise gate effect open and you've probably noticed that it has started to remove noise already, but it's far from a satisfying result. And as I said in the beginning, I haven't used this before so I will try and explain every knob as good as I can.

Detect freq
This knob is used to tell which where in the signal frequence the true sound comes from. Let's say your voice as an example that your voice is closest to 3kHz most of the time when you sing then you set that knob to that and it will try and filter everything around. Trial and error works, just set it to whatever gives you the best result.

Bypass
This button disables the noise gate and it will act as if it was never turned on.

Stereo
This button is used if it will be processing a stereo signal, in your case it's mono so don't bother much with this.

Attack
This is the amount of time it takes for the gate to open after the signal it processes has gone beyond the treshold limit. I found it useful for my vocals to have a fast attack speed so it opens when I begin to speak, otherwise it might not get the beginning of your words when you start to sing.

Release
This is the amount of time it takes for the gate to close again after the signal has gone under the treshold limit. Resulting in background noise when you stop singing if you have a slow release time. As for vocals, I found it best to have a fast release time as well.

Expansion
This big knob lets you change between using the expander or the gate. Since we're focusing on the gate in this tutorial, please just turn it all the way to the right.

Sense
This is the treshold. It sets the limit as to when the gate should either open or close. Use trial and error here to find the correct limit for you and will result in good quality sound.

ENDINGGG
Now, if you set a fast relase and attack time and the detect freq correctly, as well as a good treshold limit, you should get something like this.

Without gate:
http://www.4shared.com/audio/Oa4esAsB/without_gate.html

With gate
http://www.4shared.com/audio/hRdLgDAi/with_gate.html

If there are any question regarding the noise gate, just post here and I wil try my best to answer them

yeaaah ~ nice topic !

Haha yeah, fishfillets is one of the best free VSTs out there and I've used it quite a few times. The only downside I find with gates is that I tend to hear the opening and the closing which actually bothers me quite a bit, but of course when you don't really have a choice, noise gate is probably the thing for you.

In my opinion, you shouldn't really use noise gate unless you need to because the noise usually gets drowned out by the background music anyway (except for ballad or piano versions of a song) and also for the reason that it changes the quality of your microphone. That's just me though.

I'm glad someone came and actually did an introduction about this VST. Kudos and thanks!! >w<)b

awesome thread! i'll try this for my next recording

krannda wrote:In my opinion, you shouldn't really use noise gate unless you need to because the noise usually gets drowned out by the background music anyway (except for ballad or piano versions of a song) and also for the reason that it changes the quality of your microphone. That's just me though.

I can't say that I agree with you on this one. When you record a vocal or an instrument you should hear nothing, but what you wish to record. It depends on what you wish to do with your project, for example if you wish to add certain effects on your vocal it will also process the noise picked up from either your computer or whatever is in the background resulting in poor processing and a generally bad sound.

I do recommend for those of you who use this tutorial to put the noise gate and/or compressors in the very first position of your effect chain. Whether to use it before or after equalizers is questionable, but multiband compressors usually makes that up for me.

Thanks for this!

I have the FloorFish VST lying around but I never knew how to use it, so this is a big help!

What i hate is that i have a condenser mic and still has some noise.....
I'll try this VST since i think reaper doesn't have it~