Gating
Signal shaping / Transient and tone design
A gate is a shaping tool.
What It Does
VisualGate puts the signal and the shape you're imposing on it in the same picture. Input, output, and the envelope itself are drawn together, so you're not reading a gain-reduction meter and imagining the rest — you watch the curve you're building land on the waveform that triggered it.
The threshold is a line you drag onto the signal. Attack, hold, and release are the shape under your hand, redrawing as you move them. Knee and S-curve decide how the edge arrives — hard and percussive, or eased in. Accent puts weight back into the front of a note. And A-Gain doesn't just make what passes through louder: switch it from Linear to Saturation or Overdrive and the material you kept gets driven, so the shaping and the colour happen in one move instead of two plugins.
Ambience decides how much space stays behind the shape, so a tightened part still sits in a room instead of a vacuum.
Why one is enough
Shaping a signal takes three things, and VisualGate is complete on all three. Reading the signal accurately. Detection runs from single-sample peak through 40-sample blocks to 5 ms and 10 ms RMS, so a percussive hit and a sustained take each get a detector that suits them. The sidechain listens to SELF, external, or bus input with sweepable high-pass and low-pass, and you can solo the filtered signal to confirm what's driving the shape before you commit to it. Drawing the shape. Threshold, range, attack, hold, and release build the envelope; hysteresis keeps the edges stable; knee and S-curve set how the front arrives; accent restores weight to the transient. Focus mode hands you the envelope's own control points to place directly on the waveform. And Reverse flips which side of the threshold survives — instead of keeping what rises above it, the loud material is taken out and what sits underneath is what you keep, which is how you lift a room, isolate what a dominant hit was covering, or build the exact complement of a shape you already made. Carrying the tone. A-Gain drives what survives in Linear, Saturation, or Overdrive, so character is part of the shaping gesture rather than a separate stage. Ambience returns a measured amount of space so the result still breathes. Oversampling is there when the drive is doing real work. Around it: A/B slots for honest comparison, factory presets as starting points, stereo metering with input and output gain on the same wall, six interface languages, and VST3, AU, AAX, and standalone builds for macOS and Windows. Shape, colour, and the picture of both. There's nothing left in the job for another plugin to finish.
How It Works
Specifications & System Requirements
| Formats | Details |
|---|---|
| Plug-in formats | VST3, AU, AAX, Standalone |
| Operating systems | macOS 11+ (Apple Silicon native), Windows 10/11 (64-bit) |
| License | 7-day trial (1 machine) · Perpetual (up to 3 machines), managed from your modou dsp account |
FAQ
Yes — every product gets a 7-day free trial. There's no separate trial build: install VisualGate, then request your trial from inside the plugin or from the License page in modou DSP Central.
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