what noise to purchase?

[numpty]

I have built all of my effects pedals so far apart from a boss compressor (which i dont use). however i would like to buy a noise gate pedal ( as it shouldn't effect the tone why build it ?) i have seen a beringer cheapo at £14 and a boss at £48. the beringer is plastic and ugly but if it does the job why worry once adjusted it can be forgotten, but is it any good? Has anybody any opinions or tried one? i would like to know.

[darron]

a noise gate isn't supposed to flavour your tone, but all active effects do add noise to your signal. i personally don't like the behringer range of effects. for DIs and amps etc. they are fantastic value for money if you are on a budget, but their effects strike me as almost toys. they come in a plastic enclosure, so there's no shielding from interference. some people will tell you that that's not such a problem, but i don't like the idea of it at all. i bought an acoustic simulator and found a lot less noise when i used a true bypass to take the effect right out of my chain. all of the weight in the pedals comes from a piece of metal that they put on the bottom plate, otherwise it would feel like a toy also. a lot of the components are surface mount.

if you're learning, or practicing in bedroom levels with friends, then the behringers would be a nice cheap idea to play with to find different effects that you like.

it would be a cheaper option to buy the behringer than make one yourself, that's for sure!

[Mark Hammer]

Noise gates do not affect your tone, they just affect your playing.

In principle, they work great....IF you insert them into the right context, have the right expectations for them, and know how to tweak them.  Attempt to step over any of those requirements and they start to be a royal PITA.

"Any good?" is a bit of a tricky question.  I am sure that a $500 high-end gate could also be a PITA if you were expecting too much from it, using it in a situation mismatched to its capabilities, and setting it up wrong.

So, what is the optimal situation/setting to use it in?  The first thing to consider is that the noie gate has to be able to tell the difference between signal (with noise in it) and pure noise (without valid signal), and it typically attempts to do so based on signal level alone.  Sounds simple but it is a VERY big challenge.  If you feed the gate a signal where the guitar is only a bit louder than background hum and buzz, nailing a suitable threshold for turning the gate on/off will be extremely difficult.  Sure, you could set the turn-on threshold a little higher but you'd miss the initial pick attack of the notes and lose the tail end of sustained notes too, and you'd always have to pick hard.  Set the turn-on threshold too low, and the only time you get helpful gating is when you stop playing for a couple of seconds, stand away from the lighting and amps (making sure to face away from them), and touch your bridge.  Otherwise you'll be stuck with perpetual hum and hiss.

The other challenge gates often face is that people stick 'em at the wrong point in the signal path.  On the one hand, you probably want the gate to clean up all the noise accumulated across your pedals and cables, so the natural urge is to stick it last.  On the other hand, as all that noise accumulates, the task of identifying a threshold that clearly differentiates between levels associated with noise and levels associated with valid signal becomes that much harder.  In a perfect world, what you do is use two of them - one at the front and one at the end - with thresholds set generously so that as much signal gets to pass through as possible, and you drive each gate with the same envelope signal.  To the best of my knowledge, there is no floor system that works like that.

Since a gate is unlikely to be something you switch on and off on a regular basis as you might a booster, the fact of the cheap plastic chassis should not be a deterent.

[numpty]

In that case maybe i should build two noise gate units such as the mxr- I have seen a schematic I wonder if the is a perfboard layout? I could  buy a couple of beringers if they as good as the mxr electonically, and hide them in a metal box with a lid!
A simple kill switch could work when not playing the guitar. I have built a ross compressor, its better than the boss but still dont like anything that affects the dynamics of the signal, i think that from what you two say, that noise gates do just that. My strat picks up anything and everything such as flourescent lights, computer monitors etc, it can be quite annoying and hopeless with very high gain effects.

[Mark Hammer]

The first step to getting noise gates to perform well is to feed them the best quality signal you can.  Again, keep in mind you have to make it as easy as possible for them to tell the difference between what you want to keep in your output signal, and what you don't want to keep.

One of the things I've noted/suggested in past is that we generally want our first stage of "signal hygiene" first in the chain, or as early as possible, and we want it to extract the hum.  Hum is not only annoying to listen to on its own but it provokes bad behaviour from other effects.  Keep in mind that your distortion pedal will also amplify any hum it sees x200 or whatever, and as a steady-state oscillation it will drive things like delays or anything else that is clocked a little nuts too.

At the complete opposite end, what accumulates over pedals is generally not hum but hiss.  So, the "ideal" setup is a hum filter/gate up front, and a hiss filter at the exit door.  There are many so-called noise filters available commercially, and use of one in conjunction with a gate might prove very useful.  Unfortunately, we have never really put our heads together here to design a DIY noise filter.

Finally, I will note in passing that the SSM2166 chip (occasionally available, but generally out of production) has what is termed "downward expansion" built into it.  This does not gate, per se, but rather exaggerates differences between low-level signals below some preset threshold; essentially the complete opposite of what a limiter does (where big differences between loud signals above some threshold are diminished).  The advantage this provides is that, when set right, you don't lose the "tail" of decaying notes nearly as much as you do with a true on/off gate.

[Shepherd]

Noise gates do not affect your tone,

[Mark Hammer]

Well, they are not intended to.  I suppose if one thinks that the buffers on the input of Boss pedals "affect your tone" then, yes, noise gates affect your tone.  But they are designed to add no coloration when the signal gate is on.  Obviously, when the gate is off and all the amp gets is silence, yeah, I suppose you could call that a wee change in tone.   Personally, I would describe it as a change in sound rather than a change in tone, though.  A change in tone would be something that affected the tonal quality even when it wasn't cutting the signal out.

Imagine you had a booster pedal you loved, and like the Roger Mayer pedals, it had a 2nd output.  Now feed that output to an off-line sidechain.  The sidechain follows the envelope of your signal.  Okay, now run your booster output to a relay and govern the relay with the sidechain control signal.  You now have a noise gate.  Your noise gate pedal signal path basically consists of a relay.  Can't get much purer than that, right?

Now, if we are talking about a noise filter, that could be said to affect one's tone since it adjusts the amount of treble commensurate with the input signal level and sensitivity setting.  But what a gate does is absolutely no different than a relay or a buffered volume pedal.

[greigoroth]

Noise gates shouldn't add noise. With that in mind I would stay as far away as possible from the Behringer. The other guitarist in my band bought the the NR100 noise reducer and when engaged it added distortion (!!!) to the signal. When run on the clean channel you could hear a clear loss of treble and the addition of distortion. It was bizarre. On the dirt channel it also changed the charactar of the distortion, so I assume that the distortion that was present while we ran it on clean was also present on the dirt channel and was making it sound well... different. The noise gate might be better (I've heard that for example their Univibe-ish pedal is an absolute cracker) but I wouldn't buy it without trying it first. As to what Mark said, well, I think the rackmount ISP decimator has exactly that, two separate noise floors... or in my little non-technical guitar world I understood it as that - I reckon it would make interesting reading for those who know more about these things (hey, I'm trying to learn...). They also make a stompbox, but that is only a one way thing - but they state that it should only be used on one channel because the level appropriate for one channel will not be appropriate for another. I am planning on getting one and putting it in a loop with my distortion, that way the dirt side is always filtered and the clean side is always pristine.

[Alex C]

what noise to purchase?

I have a drawer full of non-functioning boards and failed projects.  They hiss and hum like crazy, and are likely the best noise in town.  I'll sell you the lot of 'em for cheap! 

[Mark Hammer]

Noise gates shouldn't add noise.

Yep.  What they are supposed to do and what a given design does do may be two different things.  Certainly when FETs are used as the control element, there can be clipping due to the FET's dynamic limitations.  I remember when the Jon Gaines project/design that I have posted on my site was published in Modern Recording magazine, there was a flurry of letters in the ensuing months about buzzing and chatter.  The brunt of it was essentially from people who were getting FET-chatter from the tail end of notes as a result of envelope ripple.  When the sidechain circuit does not convert the average signal level into a smooth DC voltage, you end up with a type of high-speed residual ripple that translates into the FET turning on and off rapidly.  To our ears it can sound like distortion, but it is actually high-speed switching.  Jon's solution was to increase the decay time.  I tried it and it works nicely.

[greigoroth]

Maybe I should ask before trashing a pedal 

[soulsonic]

I use a simple momentary mute pedal to cut the sound while playing - but it's more for feedback stopping than anything to do with noise. But it's fun because I used a nice light-action footswitch that lets me do stuttering and stuff like that if I want to be silly.

[darron]

I use a simple momentary mute pedal to cut the sound while playing - but it's more for feedback stopping than anything to do with noise. But it's fun because I used a nice light-action footswitch that lets me do stuttering and stuff like that if I want to be silly.

after converting my tubescreamer to true bypass, i was left with the original momentary switch. i was thinking of using it to take out all the highs for old style leads, but ended up converting it to a mute switch connecting signal to ground. this was stupid because i always stepped on it accidentally while using the stomp switch, but it always did pop a little bit. i get what you mean for having a convenient mute switch.


another thing you could consider along those lines is just buying a planet waves circuit breaker plug and install it on one of your guitar leads. they also come as an entire lead. i have one and find myself muting with it all the time. just don't lend them to people because they can never work them out on stage and cause lots of problems!
http://www.planetwaves.com/Pcablesdetails.aspx?ID=1