Question

Dear Presonus Community,

I was wondering if it is possible to feed the sidechain of the gate plugin from the same signal but from an earlier stage in the signal chain. Let me explain what I want to do:

Input -> "This signal should trigger the gate" -> Distortion Plugin -> Gate -> Output

The goal is to use the gate right before the output but to "watch for the signal" before the distortion plugin. I got the idea from the guitar stomp box Boss NS-2. But I was only able to recreate the behaviour by copying the audio material to an fx-empty second channel, setting the master fader volume of this channel to minimum and creating a pre-fader send to the gate-sidechain of the processed channel.

Do you have any good ideas how to solve this? It would be a very useful thing to have since the gate could work much more aggressively than before the distortion ...

Best regards

Elf

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this is to create a bus, insert the distortion and the gate in the bus, and configure the side chain to the gate from the unprocessed channel.

In my example here I have a guitar track.  I created a bus and inserted distortion then gate.  The sidechain to the gate comes from the unprocessed guitar track.  Then the send to the distortion occurs after the sidechain.  Does this achieve what you want?

Optionally you can make the side chain and the distortion sends pre-fader and then silence the unprocessed track.