We show why using a noise gate on high-gain guitar sounds is a good idea, and the difference that using an "intelligent" gate like the TC Electronic Sentry can make.
EDIT:
Getting a lot of comments asking about using this with just an amplifier providing all the gain, rather than pedals. Here’s a summary of both methods…
The rule is you want the clean guitar going into the input of the pedal, then your source of gain (pedals or amp, makes no real difference) should be fed from the send of the pedal, and come back via the return before feeding the main gated output to ‘something’. This could be your stage amp or a recording interface, etc.
In practice, if you use pedals for gain then you go Guitar ~ Sentry Input
Sentry Send ~ gain pedals ~ Sentry Return
then finally the Sentry Output goes to your amp.
If you use your amp as your source of gain then it’s the same process, you just have to have an effects loop so that you can address the pre-amp and output stages of your amp separately.
In this case you go:
Guitar ~ Sentry Input
Sentry Send ~ Amp input
Amp FX Loop Send ~ Sentry Return
Sentry Output ~ Amp FX Loop Return
If your amp doesn’t have an FX Loop and you rely on it for providing high gain, then this solution probably won’t work that effectively.
Bit of background:
We record a lot of distorted guitars and were spending a lot of time having to edit out all the gaps where the guitarist isn't playing and the noise from the pedals was clearly audible in the mix. Using a pedal at the source to solve this problem saves a bunch of time later and it's much easier to get good results than applying a gate to the distorted signal afterwards. This is also perfect for getting the definition on precision picking parts and palm muted sections. Basically, if you make any flavour of metal, this is your friend.
Any questions, just pop them in the comments!
