Adding a gate to an existing pedal

[jrmy]

All right, so the RAT thread in the gear section got me thinking about this... how hard would it be to add a knob-controlled gate to an existing pedal? Are gates difficult to work with?

[TweedBassman]

depends on how fancy you want to get with the gate. if you want sensitivity controls or any kind of control really, it's gonna be a little tough and require a bunch of circuitry.

a great way to get a gated sound on the cheap is to add a voltage starve to a fuzz or dirt pedal; combined with a feedback loop and the dirt pedal's gain or fuzz control, you can usually get a noise gate effect with juuust the right setting. that's how a lot of fuzz's are gated, usually by starving or mis-biasing just enough to get the circuit to shut down when no input signal is present.