Hey guys, today we’re going to talk about creating a pulsing tremolo effect on a guitar
track, similar to what we have in Green Day’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
Specifically, I want the tremolo to be locked to the project tempo.
First let’s play back our original track so you can hear what we started with.
I recorded this with my Les Paul through an Avid Eleven Rack to create a simple distorted
guitar track.
Before we get started with the actual editing, here’s the final product.
Alright so to create this, all we need is a program with MIDI and a side chain noise
gate, so I’ll be using Reaper.
The first thing we do is record the guitar track.
When you do this it has to be with the project metronome so you can lock the effect to a
MIDI track afterwards.
Just make sure to set the tempo first, and play along with the metronome as best as you
can.
After that, we need to create a MIDI track.
For the MIDI track, I used a simple drum kit virtual instrument and just had a snare hit
every sixteenth note.
This won’t be a part of the final song; it will just act as a trigger to release the
noise gate.
What I want to do next is record the snare hits as an audio track, just to make it a
little easier to work with.
Now I need to work with the signal routing to get the snare track as the auxiliary track
on the guitar.
I open the signal routing for the guitar track and set it to 4 tracks instead of two.
Then I add a receive from the snare.
For the settings, I set the receive to be on the 3/4 stereo pair of the guitar track
so it won’t be audible, and I set it to pre fader.
With it being pre fader, I can turn down the fader on the original snare track so it’s
not heard in the mix, but the signal will still be going fully to the guitar track.
I’ll use Reaper’s built in noise gate plugin as the noise gate that will create
the tremolo.
The first thing I need to do is set the detector to auxiliary input left and right.
Now the noise gate detects the constant snare hits to tell it when to open, instead of the
guitar itself.
This will allow the gate to release in time with the project, and by doing this I’ll
get the gate to open every sixteenth note instead of every quarter note when I strum
the chords.
After the detector is set, we play the track on loop and begin adjusting the noise gate
to get our effect.
The very first slider to adjust is the threshold.
First bring it up to 0, then slowly lower it back down until you start to hear the guitar
come in.
We want this low enough so it triggers with every snare hit, but not so low that it starts
to prolong the opening of the gate.
It should still close abruptly after opening.
Right now the gate tremolo sound is really abrupt.
It comes on basically instantaneously when the snare hits and then closes rather quickly,
without any fades or anything like that.
To deal with how it comes on, I like to adjust the attack.
I find this works well at around 35 milliseconds for this track.
When you do this, it adds a 35 millisecond fade in to the beginning of each gate opening.
We start to get a smoother sound, but the delay can make the effect sound a little out
of sync.
To fix this, I just add a little pre-opening, usually at about half the attack time.
Since we’re dealing with all digital audio, the pre-opening can act as a look ahead and
start to open the attack before the threshold is reached.
This pretty much takes care of that out of sync issue.
Next I just adjust the hold and release.
The release sets the fade out time, and I’ll set it to 80 milliseconds to get a good smooth
fade out without it lasting too long.
Then I adjust the hold until the entire length of the gate opening is exactly how I want
it to be.
In this case, that’s around 40 milliseconds.
In some cases, you might also want to adjust the dry signal, that way the even when the
gate is closed, there’s still some sound coming in and the tremolo effect doesn’t
drop the level all the way to 0.
I don’t want to use that for this tutorial, but I just thought I’d mention it’s an
option.
So after all this work, we have a tremolo effect that will fit perfectly with our project
tempo.
This is a real advantage to do it this way, since a lot of tremolo plugins will just have
a speed control, but it doesn’t necessarily lock to the project.
This isn’t an issue for most use cases, but to achieve the effect like this it’s
absolutely essential that it locks.
Thanks for checking out this video on how to use a noise gate as a tremolo effect.
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