Any Simple and verified nise gate circuit to build?

[nguitar12]

Hello everyone I am looking for simple and noise gate circuit to build.
After a failure on MXR noise gate (I heard many people fail on this circuit, maybe there have some problem?). I decided to try another one.
Just wonder if there any verified project recommended? I prefer having a gate LED and a release control.

Many thanks.

[Mark Hammer]

Almost all simple noise-gate circuits will "work", but will provide problems for the user if you expect them to do too much.

The main difficulty is that they use the level of the signal as a way of telling noise apart from signal.  That is an easy distinction to make when they are used to tell the difference between hitting a mic'd-up bass kick drum and random vibration of the kick drum by other people's amplifiers.  However, when trying to tell the difference between the gentle decay of a lightly-strummed chord, and background hiss, the task becomes much more difficult for the circuit.

That difficulty is increased if there is any hum in the signal path, and that hum is amplified across the signal path.  And if the gate is placed near the end of your pedal chain, it becomes even harder for the gate to tell the difference between noise and softer guitar.

I've been recommending use of two noise-control devices for years now: one at the start of the pedal chain and one at the end.

But, now that I think of it, I wonder if some of the legwork might not be done by having a steep fixed filter at the input to the pedal-chain, to keep out EMI/hum.  It should be possible to stick a reasonable 4-pole highpass filter at the entry point to one's pedalboard, set high enough to keep the power-line AC nasties out, but low enough that the player doesn't have to sacrifice bass response.

[pinkjimiphoton]

i have to second mark's approach.

i use an ns2 on the floor in my pb.... my fuzzes and wah hit the input, and the noisier overdrives (boss sd1 and suzy q) are in the loop. that way my guitar and fuzzes still interact right (fuzzfaces before and after wah, btw) and get benefit of the noise reduction, most of the hiss and crap from the others is also nuked, and i have a nice cleanish signal to drive my modulation an time effects. i put a pink's clipper (use the search function if curious) after all the dirt, and just before my delay as a boost... a HUGE boost if necessary... and it's much cleaner. then i leave mild gating on in my amp, that's built in (i use a cyber deluxe live almost exclusively for the last 4 years or so). works great.

if your build failed, first suspect caps. i have seen so many caps fail now it would make your @$$ hurt. make sure any resistors aren't "decapitated"... i find tayda resistors in particular often break internally on one end, making the circuit fail, even tho they look fine.
if that doesn't work, check the semiconductors.

the old dod noise gate is probably one of the easiest to clone, it works fairly well but the boss "clamps down" smoother. i haven't tried a decimator.

to quiet fuzzes a little sometimes a diode clipper in line with the feedback path of a q or oa seems to help. germanium works best in my experience... you can quiet the ocean in a big muff pi fairly well just by adding one ge diode in parallel with either d3 or d4 (as marked on the board) sorry, been a while and i forget which. one will take out a lot of noise, one won't be noticeable.

i believe there's a vero project for the decimator on tagboardeffects.blogspot,com,  IvIark and Mirosol go above and beyond trying to support the community with some ridiculously hip layouts. good luck man!

[Kipper4]

I have built and like my DOD FX30 gate.
You should be able to find all the docs easily over at the other place.
Good luck
Rich

[nguitar12]

I have built and like my DOD FX30 gate.
You should be able to find all the docs easily over at the other place.
Good luck
Rich

Is it the schematic you mentioned?

[Mark Hammer]

That is the basic gating circuit, but it has been redrawn to omit the send/receive loop.

[Fp-www.Tonepad.com]

mxr noise gate at www.tonepad.com

Now, that's verified, I've built it and probably a couple of hundred more people have, However, there seems to be a high failure rate in building these. Anyway, I really like what it does, worth looking at.

[Mark Hammer]

I had one i the late 70's and they worked fine.

However, there seems to be a high failure rate in building these.

Any common theme to the build failures, or is it just the usual sources of failure (bit of this, bit of that, bit of the other stuff) that the FAQ addresses?

[Morocotopo]

I built an MXR noise gate a looong time ago. And I have an original ´70´s or ´80´s one  on loan from a friend. The big problem with this build is getting the FET to gate correctly. The original uses a grey FET, I was unable to read the part name when I opened it some time ago. The FET needs a very low Vgsoff, if I don´t remember wrong.