If you’ve tracked an instrument or vocal at home, you’ve likely noticed a vague hum and white noise droning away in the background of your recording. Some of this is fine, but as you begin to layer tracks the sounds of the room and preamp noise begin to compound into an unacceptable nuisance in the recording and must be removed when possible - namely, when the track is supposed to be silent, it should be silent. One way to go about this is to write in automation on your fader, lowering the volume whenever the instrument isn’t playing. Another method would be to toggle the mute switch when nothing should be playing.

But the far simpler solution is to take advantage of gates to attenuate a signal when it's volume gets low. Gates are a lot more versatile than an automatic mute switch, however, and provide a full range of utility and creative effects. In this guide, we’ll cover the controls you’ll need to most effectively set a gate.