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Just realized my noise gate settings were killing my acoustic guitar tone for 4 months
So I record little acoustic covers in my apartment in Denver as a hobby, nothing serious, maybe 2 songs a week. Last Tuesday my buddy Marcus came over to jam and he asked why my guitar sounded so thin and choppy on the recordings I played him. We pulled up my DAW and he pointed right at the noise gate I set up 4 months ago to kill hiss from my cheap interface. Turns out the threshold was set way too high and it was cutting off the tail end of every single note and chord I played. I bypassed it and re-recorded the same song, and the difference was night and day, the guitar finally breathes. Now I only use the gate on my vocal track and leave the guitar channel alone. Has anyone else messed with a plugin so long they forgot it was even causing a problem?
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lopez.quinn7d ago
Four months of recordings where your guitar was basically doing its best impression of a walkie talkie with a dying battery. But hey, at least Marcus caught it before you hit the one year mark and had to throw out a whole album's worth of chopped up strumming. Setting a gate on acoustic guitar is like putting a screen door on a submarine, it just lets the wrong stuff in and keeps the good stuff out. The real lesson here is that noise gates are sneaky little gremlins that sit there quiet until you forget they exist, then they eat your sustain for breakfast. Good call keeping it on vocals only, let the guitar breathe, it earned it.
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