ilovefuzz.com

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?

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.