Nice job MIke. Keep them coming. ;-)

Mike,

What a nice and concise tutorial!
I'm a complete novice when it comes to audio. After taking a few minutes to review your article, I now not only know what the "Noise Gate" FX is for, but I also know how and when to use it. You clearly have a gift for explaining audio in terms that even a complete novice can understand.

-Dan

What a great explanation, clear and concise.

I have used some gates that also feature a hold or range control. Instead of turning the gate completely off, it will leave some of the sound leaking through. It allows the signal to be greatly reduced without removing the ambience completely. This is vary valuable when you are using a gate on the original recording.

I think my age and analog roots are showing.

And you don't actually need a noise gate for this, which I avoid due to the unnatural lack of room tone on the gate processed signal. I get rid of, actually reduce to a level where it's not consciously heard, the unwanted sound by using a compressor/expander function in my audio editor. I look at the waveform to determine where the noise floor lies and then compress anything below that as much as needed to make it unobtrusive but not totally absent. You'd be surprised at how important room tone is in the final product.

Great stuff--you really give a clear explanation of something that people often have difficulty with!

Fabulous Mike! . . Well done . . cleared up some detail for me, very quickly too! - So well represented and a joy to read and experience.

I look forward to the others you have planned, when you are ready . .yeah?

Grazie

Great job, thanks. That brings up a question I have always had. Why is it that the scale for audio starts at a high negativ value (ie -18) then continues up to a less negative value, but never goes above zero? I would have assumed that the midline would be zero, above it would be increasing positive values, and below it would be increasing negative values. If any body could explain the theory of this I would greatly appreciate it.
thanks,
Carson Calderwood

Thanks. I can't wait to work through that.

Great tute!
I can't wait for the EQ and, more importantly for me, the Compression tute. I've been reading the interesting thread here on compression, and I'm still havig a vaguely hard time wrapping my head around the whole concept of doing it "right." A tutorial in your style will help quite a bit, I think.
Thanks for the great job!

reat utoria !
(after reading it): Great Tutorial !
Cant wait for the other two!
Man , put this in with all the great info from this forum and things like Spots book's and training,Gary and Ed's stuff, Billy Boys web pages and all the others out there.
Thanks To All!

What a great tutorial Mike, thanks!

To reinforce the descriptive words with pictures, then to actually hear what's being described is such a good way of getting it across.

Looking forward very much to the other two ....

(I couldn't get the media working in Opera either - no surprise - it doesn't display my website - but good ole IE was fine.)

Thank you for the great tutorial Mike.

For those of you having problems printing the article as I did go to Tools/Internet Options/Accessibility and check off Ignore Font Sizes and Ignore Font Styles specified on Web pages. At a screen resolution of 800 x 600 the images will fit and all but a few words at the extreme right of most of the lines will fit as well. The time it took to write the words in by hand was well worth it.

Thanks again.

John

Just wanted to add my thanks to the others. Great tutorial. The graphics and audio/video examples were especially helpful. Much better than reading a book or watching a lecture. Very much looking forward to the other two tutorials you mentioned.

Try printing it horizontly, no problem then.

Great stuff I now know what its for .. thanks for your time ....



Flack