New Music Gear Monday: Denise Audio Poltergate Gate Plugin
Most good engineers know how to make leakage work in their favor, but sometimes it’s just too much to deal with. This can come from an inexperienced drummer that’s not used to controlling his or her dynamics in the studio, or a drum kit with unbalanced levels on the drums or cymbals. There are now many great gate alternatives that can be used in these cases, but usually we end up with a long signal chain of different processors to control the problem. The new Poltergate plugin from Denise Audio is a way to gain the ultimate control over leakage while using fewer processors in the operation.
Wow, What Control
Poltergate fuses the powers of transient design, dynamics, gating and de-bleeding into one plugin, and it has a number of unique parameters that take gating to the next level. There are four sections: Sidechain, Curve, Dynamics and De-Bleed that provide so much leakage control that you’ll never look at a gate the same again.
The Sidechain section, for instance, has all the parameters that you would normally expect, like Input, Threshold, Floor, Attack, Hold and Release. It also has a unique Spike control that helps to find the transients easier by exaggerating them to make the detection more precise. An Ahead parameter adjusts the amount of lookahead time so that the transient is detected and controlled well before you hear it.
While many gates have filter controls to narrow the precise area that you want the sidechain to act on, Poltergate includes a full multiband parametric EQ for that. In the display you’ll see the signal displayed with a white line that shows when the gate is opening and closing. The red line represents the Threshold signal. You can click on the Headphone icon in order to hear just the Sidechain in order to better dial in exactly what it’s hearing.
There’s a transient designer available under the Dynamics tab which appears after the gate in the signal chain. The Punch control enhances the transients. The Fat control boosts the sustain, the Duration control controls its length, and the Attack controls the speed that it ramps up.
The De-Bleeder section tops off an already sophisticated processor. It’s divided into Hi-Pass and Low-Pass sub-sections. Each of these have a Mode control that adjusts the amount of filter that’s applied, as well as a Release control.
Add these all up and you have a gate on steroids that should be able to clean up any track. Even better is that it’s still on sale.
The Denise Audio Poltergate is current available for about $67 (after currency conversion) instead of the normal $112. You can find out more here, or check out the video below for more on how it works.
