DG8 Dragon Gate was designed with usability in focus. An important requirement was to clearly visualize the audio levels in play in order to facilitate precise fine tuning of threshold, attack, hold, release and attenuation (floor level). Especially the floor display gives you remarkably clear visual cues to how the gate is affecting the sound both when it comes to timing and attenuation amount. The threshold knob and meter is situated next to an input level meter. This makes it very easy to find the right threshold level for your signal.
Sidechaining
You can’t make a noise gate without providing sidechain functionality. DG8 not only has sidechain inputs, it also adds the possibility to filter your sidechained control signal using a lowpass, bandpass or highpass filter. This makes it easy to sort out specific frequencies in your control signal (e.g. the snare drum of a complete drumkit).
The standard behavior of a sidechained noise gate is to open the gate when the control signal exceeds the threshold level. However, many gates also let you reverse this behavior and instead make the signal “duck” for the control signal. Flip the DG8 around, turn on ducking mode and voilà, your pumping pad can now be controlled in very great detail with attack, hold and release time set as fits your needs.
Hysteresis
Set the hysteresis button to the difference between the threshold for closed -> open and the threshold for open -> closed. This way you can set a higher level for when the gate kicks in and a lower level for when it closes. Thus you can avoid stuttering sounds, especially for bass sounds or LFO modulated synths.
CV
Although DG8 only uses one unit of rack space, it is still quite versatile also when it comes to CV-control. With four CV-inputs (attack, release, filter frequency, floor) and one output (gain) only your creativity limits what you can achieve on the backside of the Reason rack.
Reject out
To even further facilitate creative routing, DG8 provides outputs (reject out) for the audio that doesn’t make it through the gate. Combine this signal with the main outputs to sum the signals back to the original. Add a raging distortion to the louder parts of the signal and a blissful delay to the softer parts and you will have yourself a happy guitarist!
Summary of features:
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NEW in 1.1: Intelligent softened attacks to further avoid stutter in bass heavy sounds
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NEW in 1.1: A boost button that let’s you boost the control signal if it’s very low (e.g. when using the HP filter) to better use the whole width of the input meter.
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Attack times down to 0.5 ms
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Reject/Main out for creative FX routing
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Sidechain input
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Ducking mode option when using sidechain
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CV control of attack time, release time, filter frequency and attenuation amount (floor)
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Gain out CV to use for other interesting effects
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Filtering - to avoid frequencies interfering that are not part of the source. For instance, the DG8 Dragon Gate can isolate on the snare or the kick in a drum set or use on beat box drumming to have different drums trigger other samples.
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Monitoring of control signal (to fine tune filtering)
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Very intuitive display of signal levels that makes fine tuning of threshold/floor a bliss
