8,720
edits
Changes
m
→Signal Chain Placement
I like to place my noise gate first in my chain (or behind the wah pedal only). I don't want any devices between the guitar and the gate from compressing or adding noise to the signal, which makes the gate's job that much more difficult.
The only exception to this is with gates like the ISP G-Rack and chained DecimatorII's, which feature multiple inputs. This allows it to be placed first in the signal chain to detect the guitar signal and determine whether the gate should engage or not '''and''' last in the chain for actually gating the signal. This is the best scenario, as everything in the chain is adding noise and any distortion/compression stages in the chain are amplifying that noise. The gate at the end of the chain mutes as much of that as possible, leaving only downstream devices like the power amp to add noise, which is actually far lower than the noise that a saturated distortion pedal or pre-amp produces.
A facsimile of this setup can be done with [[#Multiple Gates|multiple gates]].