The trance gate technique (like Ross from Friends, Bicep, Max Cooper and Moderat)

hey everyone this is oscar from underdog and today i want to tell you about the transgate technique this is a technique from the early 90s when trance was one of the biggest genres in the world and you'll associate it with artists like tiesto where they take these big synth lines and chop them up into little stuttery steps nowadays you still hear this stuff in artists like bicep and other top chart artists so it's a technique that's really cool to have in your repertoire so let's have a look at how to make one of these in ableton [Music] okay so what is the transgate well the transgate is a technique where you take a long sound that fills up a lot of space and then you chop it down into little bite-sized chunks to a rhythm so in other words you go from something like this [Laughter] to something like this the essential building blocks are basically a long sound that sustains at the same volume for a long time and then a trigger that tells you when to chop up the sound to create a long sound you either play a synthesizer and hold down long notes or you can also work with a really short sound and then just put a lot of reverb on there maybe even some like compression to make sure that the reverb all stays at a relatively persistent volume the end result here is that you want a wall of sound that's just taking up too much space and then we're going to chop it up a lot of modern artists also use vocals for this so the sound of the human voice is something we attach to very strongly when we're listening to something and so if you put like just the snippet of a human voice in there plus a whole bunch of reverb and then chop that up it's going to automatically be pretty damn stimulating let me show you the basic setup in ableton so first things first we're going to need a source sound that we're then going to chop up let's use any synthesizer i recently picked up arturia's pigments so let's use that so the goal here is to play long sustained notes and we just need to find the presets that sustains at quite a high level that means that when you hold down the key it stays playing loud so we're not looking for like a pluck for instance or a percussion sound first let's just draw in a few notes and let's do a simple one note per bar chord progression so we'll create a midi clip and we'll play in some notes we'll just do a simple three chord chord progression for instance so we'll go from here to here to here and hold that last one for two bars now we're going to go into pigments and just zap through the presets find something that works this one will work but let's thicken out the sound by playing multiple notes at the same time let's maybe do a power chord a power chord just means you're playing a note then an octave above or below it and then the perfect fifth which is seven semitones up so let's just create those power chords real quick we duplicate it hold down shift up and then press down once so that we've created an octave above then let's make the perfect fifth which is just seven semitones up from the lower one now that will sound like this [Music] [Music] so let's play those chords and find a preset that we like let's use this it's a nice kind of full sound and it'll sound even better when we cut from it so this track we're going to call it the source sound now the next track that we're going to make is what we're going to call the trigger track the trigger track we're not actually going to hear the sounds on it at all we're just gonna place sounds at the right moment so that they tell the source sound when to cut in and out let's just put some audio samples in there so let's call this the trigger track then let's grab ourselves a simple audio sample let's make it really short and let's create a pattern that sounds good so let's first go to 16th notes grid that's always a good place to start and draw in a pattern and in this case what i'm going to do is every cluster of 3 16th notes that almost always sounds good and let's just duplicate that all along the timeline and to see what that sounds like so as i said we're not actually going to put that sound in the final composition what we're listening for here is its rhythm the rhythm that we are going to apply from this onto the source sound and we do that using the gate now the gate is an effect that actually it sets a threshold volume and it only lets the signal through when a sound goes over that threshold usually you would apply it to like a microphone to make sure that the microphone is completely cut until the voice starts to speak and then it opens up again but in this case we're going to abuse it we're going to do something similar to how you can use side chain compression we're going to do side chain gating so the gating tool is not going to listen to the incoming signal it's going to listen to an external signal in this case the trigger so in terms of simple steps all you got to do is go to audio effects grab yourself a gate put it on the sound source and you'll see now hopefully that the sound source is silent see that because it's not loud enough oh so we've got to raise the threshold a bit so that it's not over there but this is not going to take us anywhere first we need to add in the trigger so we use this little triangle to open up the advanced section and here is side chain the same way that in the compressor there's a side chain and you can turn it on take the audio from and then take the trigger track then you bring down the threshold until it starts to hit that threshold look at this [Music] do [Music] so you see now how the sound it follows the rhythmical pattern of the trigger and a very classic one would be to put it on every 16th note for instance like this [Laughter] [Music] and the crucial part of this is also that you can control the release time to make it more or less snappy look what happens when i tweet the release time [Music] let me do the exact same but with a voice so here's a vocal [Laughter] now one of the easy wins on this kind of a thing is to put massive reverb on it then we get ourselves the gate we open up the side chain activate it put on the trigger and find the right threshold again [Laughter] let's try a different pattern [Laughter] not bad and we can even put a reverb right after it again just to give those things space again [Laughter] and so there you have it that's the basis of the transgate technique remember to just make yourself a wall of interesting texture and then chop it up using a trigger remember to like the video subscribe to the channel and come check out one of our courses on underdog.brussels we're an online school not just a youtube channel check out one of the other videos and until next time keep producing be good to one another and take care bye-bye

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 179,744

Keywords:

Id: DxyQNgNKUf8

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/FossilStalker]

A 'trance' gate and there are no super-saws? I want my money back.

[u/Trytolearneverything]

HY ESG is free and will save you a lot of time. The best feature is the rotate knob. It’ll rotate the spacing of your gate so the sound constantly evolves.

[u/SeePage87]

Nice, this is way easier than gain automation and being able to tweak the parameters helps a lot shape things musically.

[u/Shawesome_02]

This couldn't if been recommended at a better time. I just spent all day day creating a acid synth, and this'll work perfect in it. Just subscribed.

[u/ArteHeights]

Nothing wrong with some manual labor. Though I have to mention that using a plugin like Gatekeeper will save you quite a bit of time if you're willing to spend the money. Or even Auto Pan in Ableton Live.

Still a cool tip!

[u/MarcosaurusRex]

Very cool man.

[u/buckforna]

Couldn't this be accomplished using LFOTool or VolumeShaper in less steps?

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[u/deftcats]

There are plugs that will do this for you