Waves C1 (simple gate question)

  • Thread starter Thread starter Shaw-King
  • Start date Start date
S

Shaw-King

Guest
Hey, I was just messing around with the Waves C1+ Compressor and I was trying to use the gate function to reduce the level of "breaths" in a vocal take. In other words, I wanted to compress the vocals but leave the breaths and unwanted noise untouched. Anyway, I got a pretty good setting after fiddling around for a while...but I just have one question: what does the Gate Close thing do? I kinda understand what Gate Open means: that's when the gate comes into effect, but what does the gate close do? I tried having the gate close at the same level as gate open (-40 dbs) then I pushed the gate close in -infinity and I didn't realize any difference. So how exactly do these relate to one another? Thank you
 
to my understanding, the gate close is the setting for when you want the gate to release. it's just like the attack and release on a compressor. a gate is a form of a compressor.
 
The attack and release on a compressor are measured in time (ms). The gate open and close on the Waves C1 is measured in decibals (db). It would be easy to understand if they JUST had a gate open or something similarly named. That would mean that nothing below whatever decibal the gate open is set at would be affected by the compressor (in my case -40 db). But they bring in this gate close thingy and I get all confused? What the hell does that do? I don't remember hearing a difference when I fiddled with it so what is it for then? Can anyone explain this plugin?
 
Say you have a cymbal crash in a noisy room. Well, you want the gate to open when the signal is good and loud (so you get the crash, and only the crash, not somebody's silverware clanking).

But you don't want the gate to close immediately, right? That'd leave an isolated "cra-", not a smooth decay on the crash.

You want the gate to close about when the room noise starts to overwhelm the cymbal tone (which is at a significantly quieter level than the attack of the signal, right?) so you set your gate close parameter to a lower level than the gate open parameter.

This doesn't really matter in music without dynamics, but if you were recording Real Live Music Played by Real People, it'd be a very useful control on your gate. On Neve consoles, this is referred to as "Hysteresis".

-Hoax
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Yeah, I'm trying to compress and gate some vocals and I was looking at a vocal preset that Waves had, and the gate close parameter was about the same as the gate open parameter. This mislead me into doing the same when I adjusted my compressor/gate settings. I didn't make the gate close much lower than the gate open and the result was kind of a phasy/flangy effect on the vocals. I've since adjusted it, but I'm no pro at using the gate. It's just starting to make more sense now.
 
If it resulted in a phasey/flangey sound, you might be running your gate as a {b]send[/b] effect, when it's really meant to be used as an insert effect.

If you're trying to gate a group of vocals (background vocals, for instance), you'll still get a more natural sound by inserting a gate on each track. But if you really want to gate 'em all (compressing 'em all is a trick I like to use), then buss them all to a single stereo channel, then insert a gate on that channel.

That way, you don't have the gated/ungated versions mixing together.

-Hoax
 
Oh no, they are being compressed/gated as inserts. The reason for the phasey/flangy effect is because the gate was set too high. Try, just for example, raising the gate to about -10db and you will realize that certain words get cut out completely. That's what was happening. Setting the gate open at -35db and gate close at -38db caused the beginnings and the tails of some words to no be compressed, so that was the problem. Originally I had hoped to use gating as a way of not compressing breaths while compressing vocals, but it is much less of a headache to just go to the vocals and silence or reduce the gain (about -10 to -15 db) on the breaths.

I now just use the gate so that I'm not compressing the bleed through the headphones. Before I had noticed that when I compressed something, I would then get a lot of the bleed being highly compressed in areas where, if your just looking at the waveform, looks like there is only silence. Anyway, the point is that although the gate may not be suitable to contain the breaths taken between words, it certainly helps contain the noise and the bleed through the heaphones when compressing.

Just one question, Cruel Hoax, it appears from your post that you compress first then gate. Is that correct? If so, what difference would it make if you were to gate first, then compress? How much does the routing matter when these two effects are concerned?
 
is there any way to control this plugin with midi controls???....or any of the waves plugins??

regards.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top