Man, I’m not going to have any secrets left by the end of this year. Sigh.
Another way I mix up and mess up my hobo tracks during a performance is to rhythmically gate them using another groovy free plug in: StormGate1. There’s a paid version called StormGate3 that has more features, but it seems like overkill for what I’m doing. This leaves a troubling question, however: what happened to StormGate2 ?!?
But I digress.
The basic concept of this plug in is very simple. The grid at the top is a drawable volume envelope. In the above example, the grid is 16th notes. Each green rectangle shows where the signal is being allowed through. The interface and the documentation for StormGate can be a little confusing at first, so we’ll spend some time picking it apart.
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When you first load this plug in, you’ll find that it’s running a sequence of patterns – every bar you’ll see the grid update, and hear the gating pattern change. The first thing you’ll want to do is make this stop so you can focus on creating a single pattern. To do this, click the letter A in both rows of buttons in the Patterns section (the row marked EDIT, and the one below marked “>>”).
Now, you’ll find you can draw in a pattern using the mouse. Try experimenting with Step, Spike and Exp modes for different volume curves.
That’s a good start. We’ll spend a couple more tips after this one demystifying StormGate, and discussing how I rack it up for the gig.
