The best noise gate?

GroupDIY Audio Forum

Help Support GroupDIY Audio Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Spencerleehorton

Well-known member
Joined
May 12, 2012
Messages
4,035
Location
Felixstowe, Suffolk, UK
My next project is building 6-8 noise gates for the studio.
Kick, snare, 3 x toms, guitar, bass guitar and vocals is a typical live setup which can always benefit from some decent gates so I’m sure this would interest quite a few people.
Ideally I’d like to house all 8 gates in a 2U.
Makes which are coming up are the RM68 and valley people kepex.
I have the schematic for the rm68 and I’m prototyping but nothing for the kepex.
Anyone have any thoughts on this and a schematic for the kepex?
 
Some of the Kepex use a 120v supply for the metering, others use led's so the meters are run off the 24v supply as well as the audio. Not familiar with the RM68.

The Drawmer DS201 is more flexible than either of the gates you mention & with a bit of care can be picked up as spares or repair so cheaply DIYing is hardly worth the effort. The MkII Valley people is another gate that is good.
 
Last edited:
I'd definately second Rob's suggestion of Drawmer Ds201 ,an absolute workhorse of a machine ,and even still made today ,but can be found cheap around too .
 
gyraf said:
Yes, DS201 is a great tool also, but not as easy in use imo..:  http://gyraf.dk/schematics/Drawmer_DS201.pdf

Jakob E.

Possibly, but the side chain filters on the DS201make them really good, if not the best for drums, which is appears to be one of the main uses Spencer wants them for.
 
Hello

I agree with all, DS201 in a good and very flexible gate/exp/comp/duck, and cheap second hand
I have the 301 which is the same + extra midi key input, I use it at about every mix session in a way or another.
The only drawback for the OP is that 2ch take 1U so you will end in a 3 or 4U rack space used

otherwise you have this.
https://reverb.com/item/7491660-vintage-roger-mayer-rm68-noise-gate-rack-1976

Best
Zam
 
The best noise gate I ever heard was done digitally inside some efx processor (while at Peavey). The coder could not explain to me how it worked and I didn't want to look a gift horse in the mouth so blessed it as it was (maybe he copied it and didn't want to admit that to me). 

For simple on/off gates JFET shunts are adequate and cheap. One trick I used back in the day was HF pre/de-emphasis (about 12dB rise between 500hz and 2kHz). This HF boost before the hard switch, and HF cut after, takes a bunch of click out of hard gate opening/closing while signal is playing (for the no free lunch crowd, it does consume 12dB of HF headroom). That said another old studio trick to add edge to drum tracks is to use a hard gate with high threshold to add some click on purpose so YMMV.

Using VCAs allows more gentle downward expansion with much less noticeable noise floor management . If you spend the money for proper VCAs it is hard to resist the temptation to perform compression/limiting with those same VCAs already in the audio path. Back in the early 80s I made a quad noise gate/limiter (Loft 400) using relatively inexpensive OTAs in the feedback loops of op amps. This gave an extremely clean path when not gated or not limiting, and acceptable performance when gating/limiting. As I recall it sold well.   

JR
 
Ah ok, great stuff, i've got my eye on a couple of DS201 now then, look forward to using these, Im also going to build 4 x RM68 modules and see how these sound, as they seem fairly basic, and to be honest i have all the bits left over form the RM57/58 build as its very similar.
Ive drawn out a pcb, i'll make one over the next few days and populate and test.

thanks again for all your input.

regards

Spence.
 
The overlapped lf/hf filter on the DS201 allows you to home into any  frequency band you want ,so  triggering  works really nicely . Sound quality could be bettered by modern vca's Im sure ,but this one just does what it says on the tin , I always found them intuitive  to work with .
 

Attachments

  • drawmer_ds201_sm.pdf
    143.8 KB · Views: 14
Tubetec said:
The overlapped lf/hf filter on the DS201 allows you to home into any  frequency band you want ,so  triggering  works really nicely . Sound quality could be bettered by modern vca's Im sure ,but this one just does what it says on the tin , I always found them intuitive  to work with .
Yes, side chain EQ can be helpful.. I designed a one knob tilt EQ that alternated HF boost/LF cut, with the opposite LF boost/HF cut but even that was a little crude. For your own DIY gates maybe add side chain insert jacks on a couple of them, so you can patch in real EQ for fixing problem tracks. Insert jacks are cheaper (and easier, and better) than dedicated EQ in every gate side chain.

JR
 
JohnRoberts said:
For your own DIY gates maybe add side chain insert jacks on a couple of them, so you can patch in real EQ for fixing problem tracks. Insert jacks are cheaper (and easier, and better) than dedicated EQ in every gate side chain.

Maybe, but the Drawmer HPF & LPF work really well, & you can pick them up so cheaply (needing a bit of work) that you couldn't build one as cheaply (assumimg it's with a mains PSU in a rack case).
 
All the modern gates I see have auto enveloping of some description  ,the nice thing about the drawmer is its all manual control allows a huge range of misuse for purely effects purposes .Phenomenal production lifespan the 201 too must be around 35 years at this stage and still going strong .

I look at the schematic and I see no sign of balanced inputs or outputs , the version I have has jacks . ,I guess these things were almost always patched into an insert send /return ,so unbalanced in most cases anyway .
 
gyraf said:
That's for a 202 - what is the difference from 201?

Jakob E.

Hmm, no idea ....    If you look at Drawmers currently available version it is balanced xlr's.    It was definitely available balanced back in the day.  Someone on slutz thinks that the balanced version was a DS201B.  Perhaps the pcb might be the same for both but populated differently for balanced operation.

Looking at this review from '84 ( https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/drawmer-ds201-dual-gate/4072 )it seems that the XLR version was £30 more expensive, although it doesn't say that the connections are balanced .........
 
a bit annoying is that on the Rm68 there are two resistor values missing!?

both on the top half of the circuit, from the base of the first 2N3704 down to gnd?
and after the third 3704 connecting to the release pot?

any ideas on these values?
 
Hello

Rob Flinn said:
Hmm, no idea ....    If you look at Drawmers currently available version it is balanced xlr's.    It was definitely available balanced back in the day.  Someone on slutz thinks that the balanced version was a DS201B.  Perhaps the pcb might be the same for both but populated differently for balanced operation.

Looking at this review from '84 ( https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/drawmer-ds201-dual-gate/4072 )it seems that the XLR version was £30 more expensive, although it doesn't say that the connections are balanced .........

I suppose there is many revision and design change for a 30 years product !
My 301 which as previously say is supposed to be a 201 with extra key input definitely have electronically balanced IO, as 2150/2120 combo for detection and envelope shaping.

Best
Zam
 
I’m going to try substituting the bc169 and 2n3704 for bc550c or 2n5088 and the pnp transistors for BC560C.
I will use the 2n3820 as fet.
Will use polystyrene caps for the 470pf, 1000pf, 220pf, 22pf.
Electrolytic for the rest apart from the 0.47uf rant.
As long as I get the pcbs in at an angle I should be able to 8 in a 2U box with Psu and toroidal.

Any ideas of those two resistor values?
 

Latest posts

Back
Top