Trance gate tip

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Hi,

I'm new to the forum, new to lmms and new to music making, so treat me gentle please!

I've been attempting to create a usable trance gate effect and finally have a workable solution. Since I've learnt so much from the lmms community through this forum and youtube, I thought I'd share it as a kind of pay-forward.

I'm aware there's two techniques to achieve a sequenced gate (or compression) effect:

You can either send both the target instrument and the control pattern (typically a kick drum or similar) to an FX channel with a sidechain effect, or you can add a peak controller to the control pattern track and then connect a knob to it (just volume or a compression effect control or similar) .

The problem I had with the former is that the control track is still audible which isn't ideal for a trance gate, and with the latter, I couldn't get reliable results (stuttering, missed beats, and so on) at the kind of tempo you typically want for trance with 1/16 and/or 1/32 beats.

My solution is based on the 1st technique as that's the most direct in processing terms. The problem is how to get rid of the control track so you only hear the dips, and my solution is to use an extremely high frequency instrument and use a low-pass filter to remove it from the end result.

To do this, I used a TripleOscillator with white noise output with a Moog filter and the frequency knob turned all the way up, which creates a single very high pitched tone.

Then I used a sidechain gate in the FX mixer, with a low-pass filter underneath the gate, which filters out the high pitched tone after it's been through the gate.

The result is beautiful - no missed dips or distortion/clipping even with 1/32 notes at 190bpm!

It needs a fair bit of tweaking to get right:

You need just the right attack, delay and release to get a nice note without any interference, and it creates a very loud note even with the volume on the TripleOscillator turned right down. I needed to add an amplifier effect to it or extra volume control to prevent it hitting red (it really mustn't, this is essential for it to work properly).

Then you want to turn the frequency on the low-pass filter up as high as possible while still filtering out the high tone so you don't miss out highs you want.

Then you'll want to tweak the sidechain gate for the best results, threshold and ratio mainly, to get a nice crisp dip.

I hope this is useful for somebody. I have a TripleOscillator preset I can share if anyone wants it, and I have a project that demos a good set-up that will do the 1/32 at 190bpm I mentioned above.

Massive thanks to the lmms devs and the community in general!
giggedy wrote:
Wed Oct 21, 2020 6:11 pm
Hi,

I'm new to the forum, new to lmms and new to music making, so treat me gentle please!

I've been attempting to create a usable trance gate effect and finally have a workable solution. Since I've learnt so much from the lmms community through this forum and youtube, I thought I'd share it as a kind of pay-forward.
Excellent -And Welcome to the Forum giggedy !
Here are all important links:
http://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4740
-A few rules and useful forum instructions
If you like to introduce yourself, to the community, go here:
http://lmms.io/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4480

I will move your post into the Tutorial-section :)
I'm aware there's two techniques to achieve a sequenced gate (or compression) effect:

You can either send both the target instrument and the control pattern (typically a kick drum or similar) to an FX channel with a sidechain effect, or you can add a peak controller to the control pattern track and then connect a knob to it (just volume or a compression effect control or similar) .

The problem I had with the former is that the control track is still audible which isn't ideal for a trance gate, and with the latter, I couldn't get reliable results (stuttering, missed beats, and so on) at the kind of tempo you typically want for trance with 1/16 and/or 1/32 beats.

My solution is based on the 1st technique as that's the most direct in processing terms. The problem is how to get rid of the control track so you only hear the dips, and my solution is to use an extremely high frequency instrument and use a low-pass filter to remove it from the end result.

To do this, I used a TripleOscillator with white noise output with a Moog filter and the frequency knob turned all the way up, which creates a single very high pitched tone.

Then I used a sidechain gate in the FX mixer, with a low-pass filter underneath the gate, which filters out the high pitched tone after it's been through the gate.

The result is beautiful - no missed dips or distortion/clipping even with 1/32 notes at 190bpm!

It needs a fair bit of tweaking to get right:

You need just the right attack, delay and release to get a nice note without any interference, and it creates a very loud note even with the volume on the TripleOscillator turned right down. I needed to add an amplifier effect to it or extra volume control to prevent it hitting red (it really mustn't, this is essential for it to work properly).

Then you want to turn the frequency on the low-pass filter up as high as possible while still filtering out the high tone so you don't miss out highs you want.

Then you'll want to tweak the sidechain gate for the best results, threshold and ratio mainly, to get a nice crisp dip.

I hope this is useful for somebody. I have a TripleOscillator preset I can share if anyone wants it, and I have a project that demos a good set-up that will do the 1/32 at 190bpm I mentioned above.

Massive thanks to the lmms devs and the community in general!
Good to see that I and a few others, are not the only ones to make a trance gate tutorial. Very nice work giggedy.