Chop a sustained sound into a rhythm. The gate reads a sixteen-step pattern against a tempo you set, so a held pad becomes a pulse and a static noise bed becomes a part.
Tempo and step size
Tempo is the figure the pattern is measured against. Step size decides how much of a beat each of the sixteen steps covers: a quarter makes the pattern four bars long, a sixteenth makes it one bar, and a thirty-second makes it half a bar.
At 128 BPM with sixteenth steps, one step is 117 ms and the whole pattern is one bar of 4/4. That is the setting most of the patterns below were written for.
The gate is read from the absolute position in the file rather than from a running counter, so the grid stays where it is whatever happens during playback. Seeking to the middle of the track lands on the same step the export writes there.
Patterns
Eight patterns, each sixteen steps read left to right:
- Alternate and Offbeat are the same pulse a step apart. Alternate lands on the beat, Offbeat between the beats.
- Gallop leaves one step closed in every four, which pushes the rhythm forwards.
- Dotted repeats every three steps against a sixteen-step cycle, so it moves against the bar rather than with it.
- Syncopated, Pumping, and Build are longer shapes that only repeat once per cycle.
- Stab opens twice per cycle, for a pad that punctuates rather than pulses.
Swing
Swing holds every second step back by up to three quarters of a step. At 0 the grid is even. Around 30% it starts to shuffle, and near the top the pattern reads as triplets.
Swing is applied to the grid, not to the audio, so it does not change the pitch or the length of anything. It only moves where the boundaries between steps fall.
Attack and release
Attack is how fast the gate opens, release is how fast it closes. Both are one-pole ramps rather than instant switches, because a vertical edge in a gain curve is a click.
Below about 3 ms the steps are square, which is what a bright synth pad wants. On low material a short release still ticks, since cutting a bass note mid-cycle leaves an edge no ramp that short can hide. Raising release to 60 ms or more removes it.
Depth
Depth is how far the gate closes. At 100% the closed steps are silent. At 40% they drop by about 4.4 dB, which reads as a pulse under the sound rather than a chop through it.
At 0 the gate is bypassed and the audio passes through untouched.
Applying it to part of a track
The region controls confine the gate to one span of the source and crossfade at each edge, which is how you gate a pad through a chorus and leave the verse alone. The pattern still counts through the whole file, so the gated section stays aligned with the bar rather than restarting where the region begins.