Sync Gate

A tempo-synced amplitude gate — the classic trance gate. It chops your signal with a square-wave on/off pattern locked to your clock, turning a sustained pad or held chord into a pumping, rhythmic stutter. Edge slope is adjustable — from a near-instant click-free chop to a soft, breathing fade.

How it works

A square-wave gate multiplies the input, opening and closing at a musical note division of the tempo. In its Ext Clock setting it measures the interval between pulses at the clock input to lock its rate, sitting at 120 BPM until one arrives; set Clock to Song and it follows the timeline's tempo with nothing patched at all. The gate is stereo-linked — both channels share one envelope — so a stereo source keeps its image while being chopped in sync.

Controls

  • Div — the gate's rhythmic rate, stepped through twelve note divisions from whole notes down to 64ths (including dotted values). Higher settings chop faster.
  • Size — the duty cycle: how much of each cycle the gate stays open, from a tight 0.05 click to a wide-open 0.95 swell.
  • Mix — dry/wet blend. At 100% you hear the fully gated signal; pull it back to fade the chopping into the untouched source.
  • Smooth — the slope of each gate edge, from a near-instant 0.05 ms snap to a gentle 50 ms fade. Keep it short for a hard, clicky chop; open it up and the trance gate melts into a soft, pulsing tremolo. Defaults to 1 ms, the classic lightly de-clicked edge.
  • Clock — where the tempo comes from. Ext measures the pulses arriving at the clock input, which is how this module has always worked. Song follows the timeline's tempo directly, with no cable at all. Int runs at its own speed, set by the BPM field beside it. One thing worth knowing: in Ext the divisions are relative to whatever you clock it with, so feeding it sixteenths makes every label four times faster than it reads. In Int and Song the module knows what a quarter note is, so the labels mean exactly what they say.
  • BPM — the tempo for Int. In Song it greys out and shows you the timeline's tempo instead; in Ext it greys out too, because the cable is in charge.

Inputs & outputs

  • In L / In R — the stereo signal to gate; patch a pad, drone, or full mix.
  • Div / Size / Mix / Smooth CV — voltage control over each knob; patch an LFO or envelope to evolve the rate, duty cycle, blend, or edge slope for shifting, modulated patterns.
  • Clock — the beat grid (quarter notes); patch a clock to lock the gate to your tempo.
  • Reset — a rising edge re-aligns the gate phase to the start of the bar or phrase.
  • Out L / Out R — the gated stereo output.

Tips

  • Send an LFO or envelope to Size CV to breathe the gate open and shut for swells and builds.
  • Pulse Reset at the top of each phrase to keep the chop tight against the rest of your patch.
  • Lower Mix for a subtler tremolo feel instead of a hard chop.
  • Open Smooth wide to trade the hard trance-gate chop for a soft, pulsing tremolo without touching the rhythm.