hi there.
would you guys at psp be so kind that made a killer gate/expander plug, just for me i'd like that it would:

1: be RTAS and AU that has very low cpu needs

2: have a big threshold knob right in the middle, having gate closed/open indicator in close proximity (with separate red/green lights as you get more attention when something moves instead of just changing colour of one indicator), and somewhere close to these essentials - a ducking mode button (the only button i want to see in this plug) that inverts the gate action.

3: have a little smaller gate controls (attack/hold/release) and expander controls (range/ratio/knee) below the gigantic threshold knob. range from 1:1 to 10:1 so the expander would be turned off when the 1:1 range is selected. i believe these controls should be knobs that you can drag with a mouse, or click a knob and then use the arrow keys on the keyboard to tweak. also, a text box that shows current exact value and where you can type the value directly.

4: have builtin sidechain with frequency/bandwidth control, (and in rtas version, the possibility to arm an external key signal). if the bandwidth setting would be turned to either extreme, it would disable the sidechain function.

5: no graphical representation of the input/output curve to waste cpu cycles. also no analog/saturation algorithms other than if you get to some clever analog-like solution in transient shaping

why am i asking such a basic thing? because nobody has done a perfectly good gate plug yet. please do it, i'm sure it will sell. there are tons of compressor/limiter plugs but little gates. (in case you haven't noticed... and the ones that are available, suck big time, most notably when extremely fast settings are used).

for some reason gates have just been "thrown in" a compressor plug and even then implemented "with a left hand", but still, there's a place for a very good gate. it's very frustrating having to think "well i'd like to use a gate here, but i don't have a good one and i don't like to insert a compressor plug that'd just hog cpu cycles for nothing. so maybe i just don't use the gate here."

if you made such a gate that would excel in what it is supposed to do and would use very little cpu recources, that'd be used a lot. everywhere.

Hi,

Sounds interesting but looks like an expander not a simple gate. A typical gate cuts the signal whenever the signal level is below a threshold and the depth of the effect is controlled by an dB scaled attenuation control. Using expansion makes a different behavior and sound.
I am not sure how the reverse button should work. Could you give us more details?

Regards,

ducking is the opposite behaviour of gate, which means that the audio passes through when the signal is BELOW threshold and the gate is closed when signal level is hot.

this is very useful with effect return tracks where you sometimes only wish to apply the effect tail and have it muted when the vocalist sings for example. think of adding dense delay for a lead vocalist in one fx track and a normal delay in another track, and you only want that heavy delay tail to appear between phrases... you need to duck it while singing, and "reverse gate" would be the trick.

and yes, what i described is gate and expander. those can be bundled together nicely. expander in most extreme setting (when not expanding) is a gate, by definition

anyway, that would be a killer.

Thanks for info about ducking.
Getting back to gate definition the main difference I described is about the attenuation control which makes the behavior really different and very good on noise etc. On the other hand an expander working even with 1:10 ratio will still be far from gate behavior and the attenuation will strongly oscilate while in the gate it will be kept constant before an over threshold level occur. Of course in definition we can say that in extreeme settings the expander is a gate but from a real design and use point of view the results are different (checked both).

Regards,

yes, you're right, in theory an expander is a different plug than a gate; but from a live-guy point of view there should be one killer product for controlling "lower dynamics" (gating, expanding) and another killer product for controlling "upper dynamics" (limiting, compressing) - and can you see that NOBODY has ever done a killer plug to control the lower dynamics, at least that kind of product is missing as we speak.

if you can come up with something clever that could combine gate and expander with a very user-friendly way (and of course sonically perfect), that would rock. if it means different algorithms for gating and expanding, let it be, but keep the interface simple: let there be such an expander ratio control that means "off" (1:1 ratio, do nothing) in another extreme and "gate" (1:infinity, gating) in another extreme, having all expanding ratios in between, that's what i mean. if the plug needs to switch algorithms (to jump from 1:100 ratio to 1:infinity for example), let it do so automatically and give the user one simple control over it.

i know you can do it if you just thought about it throughly...

(closest thing to what i described that comes to mind would be the aphex 9621 hardware module, but even that is really not so fast to use in real life. i'm hoping this "killer gate" would be so good that i would want to use it in a live mixing project...)

I support the idea of PSP noise gate plug-in, whether it's an expander or not, as long as it's useful like the other PSP products...

(I'm not talking about PSP Flight ... Joke for the connoisseurs)