There’s much more to gating these days than just the threshold-based attenuation of noise for which the technique was first invented. Here are five groundbreaking plugin gates, each one taking its own particular approach to the concept of gating by – ahem – expanding on it in various ingenious ways.

FabFilter Pro-G

Sitting alongside Pro-C, Pro-Q, Pro-L et al in FabFilter’s roster of incalculably popular basic mixing plugins, Pro-G is an expander/gate that employs a set of six tailored ‘Style’ algorithms for adaptation to a range of sources and scenarios. ‘Classic’, ‘Clean’, ‘Vocal’ and ‘Guitar’ apply four flavours of regular downward expansion (ie, gating), while ‘Upward’ flips into upward expansion, and ‘Ducking’ inverts the gate for pumping ‘sidechain’ effects. The internal/external sidechain circuit itself enables independent levelling of the left/right or mid/side channels, filtering and auditioning, and up to 10ms of Lookahead can be dialled in for improved response at the expense of latency.

Beyond its specialities, Pro-G is quite simply an excellent expander/gate, with all the expected timing and shaping controls in place – Attack, Release, Knee, Hold, etc – and a perfectly informative graphical display showing real-time input and output waveforms. It’s the very definition of a workhorse gate, but with the Styles menu streamlining the setup procedure considerably.

Sonible smart:gate

As the name suggests, the ace up the sleeve of Sonible’s futuristic gate is the implementation of artificial intelligence in its detection circuit to make it respond to a specific signal within a mix – just the snare in a full drum mix, say. This manifests as a list of Target Profiles – ‘Vocals’, ‘Speech’, ‘Bass’, ‘Snare’, etc – and as soon as you select one, the waveform display visually reflects its successful detection (which never ceases to be slightly mind-blowing) and the gate then only responds to that component of the signal, remaining closed for everything else. From there, the gating is tweaked via the usual Threshold, Attack, Hold and Release parameters, as well as Tolerance (hysteresis, essentially), Level Bias (sharpening and blunting of level-dependency), Impact (gate closure amount) and Band Suppression (per-band release time, scaling across three bands). There’s a Ducking mode, too, which applies the same smart signal detection to an external sidechain input, so you could duck a bassline to a kick drum in a full drum loop, for example, without filtering the sidechain. Superb!

As with Sonible’s other smart: plugins, smart:gate’s ambitious proposition turns out to be fully and genuinely realised in its design and function. It really does do what it claims to, making clean-up of noisy recordings and gating of discrete elements within mixes a breeze. Oh, and you can also use it as a conventional ‘dumb’ gate, of course, should the need arise.

Unfiltered Audio G8

One of the most imaginative developers in the industry, Unfiltered Audio have racked up a strong catalogue of wildly creative effects plugins over the last decade or so, among the first of which was their insanely adventurous G8. At first glance, it appears to be nothing more than a well specified noise gate, with the standard threshold, envelope and hysteresis controls, and a helpful graphical display. As well as its ‘Regular Gating’ mode, though, G8 also offers the radical Cycle and One-Shot modes, the first looping the envelope constantly when the gate opens until it closes again, and the second completing a single pass of the full envelope when the gate opens, no matter what the input signal does in relation to the threshold in that time. In conjunction with the ability to MIDI-trigger the gate, these give G8 a powerful sound design angle, and you can also route the gated-out (rejected) part of the signal to a separate output for processing and capture in the host DAW, mix internal and external sidechain inputs, and even have a MIDI note generated every time the gate opens.

It all adds up to a plugin that takes the notion of gating and runs in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions with it, from volume-responsive tremolo and AM synthesis, to drum replacement, polyrhythmic gating and more.

Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate

Before smart:gate, there was Oxford Drum Gate, which basically performs the same sort of machine learning-driven sorcery to internally differentiate between kicks, snares and toms in a drum mix, then have the gate respond only to the selected drum type. While Sonible’s contender might appear to be the better option due to its broader remit (not just drums), Oxford Drum Gate’s focus on the kit facilitates a number of incredibly powerful deeper features that keep it very much at the top of the pile in its titular role. The transient detection section lets you add or remove individual drum hits to/from the detected stream, for example, while the Decay editor provides supremely fine control of the shape and spectral content of the release stage; and the Leveller module enables a dividing threshold to be set for ‘Loud’ and ‘Soft’ hits, which are then automatically raised or lowered towards two user-defined target volume levels. Oxford Drum Gate can also be set to output MIDI notes and export MIDI files for replacement purposes, making it an unrivalled one-stop shop for cleaning, tightening and general improvement of drum tracks.

Boz Digital Labs Gatey Watey

Finally, we’ll wrap up with by far the most straightforward plugin in our list, and thereby the ideal choice for quick and easy noise gating – with a twist. Gatey Watey adds to the requisite Threshold, Range, Attack, Release and Lookahead (up to 50ms) controls with optional high- and low-pass filtering modes for gating out only the frequencies above or below the cutoff and leaving the rest untouched. It’s a comparatively simple embellishment but one that proves hugely effective for the sensitive removal of drum mic spill, guitar amp noise, wind and other intrusions, doing significantly less damage to the retained signal than you’d get with broadband gating. Cheap and very cheerful!

Do you have a dream feature or function that you’d love to see implemented in a gate plugin? Let us know in the comments.