Dynamic Gate Sidechain Filter

Avantis Avantis Feature Suggestions
1

Hello Community, Hello Allen & Heath Team,

First of all, I would like to thank you for the magnificent work regarding Avantis 2.0—you have achieved something truly great.

I would like to propose an additional feature that would be extremely useful and, within the industry, surely revolutionary.

Many are familiar with the problem: the snare drum—or another prominent, loud source—repeatedly triggers the gate to open. However, it is not just the gate; often, duckers used for effects or expanders used for feedback suppression are also negatively affected by the snare or similar signals. While the integrated filters within the sidechain path are helpful, they are often insufficient to effectively manage this issue.

Consequently, I built a functioning filter solution myself. How did I do it?

  1. I use a copy of my vocal channel as the control signal for the vocal gate. On this copy, I heavily sculpt the EQ to minimize anything that might cause the gate to open unintentionally. This allows me to utilize steep filter slopes and shape the signal exactly as needed.
  2. Additionally, I employ a Dyn8 unit; this is sidechained to—and triggered by—the snare drum, dynamically attenuating the loud, attack-rich frequencies within the control channel (the copy of the vocal channel).

In summary, this creates a massive increase in headroom between the vocal signal and the snare within the gate. It works exceptionally well. The natural signal latency actually works to my advantage here, acting like a built-in “look-ahead” function: the Dyn8 receives the snare signal instantly, whereas the vocal signal arrives at the channel a few milliseconds later—giving the Dyn8 sufficient time to intervene.

I believe Allen & Heath could implement this feature—perhaps with some technical optimization—without significant effort. Adjusting the GUI would likely be the most time-consuming part of the process. Furthermore, the system resources required for such a feature should be quite manageable.

It would be a unique offering within the industry and would provide an elegant solution to a widespread problem.

I envision this option being accessible directly within the gate menu. You could enable or disable it and select the channel causing the problem. Perhaps also a slider to control how aggressively the dynamic filter intervenes. Done.

Give it some thought—I think it could be something great.

Best regards, David.

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Thanks for sharing your technique! It’s always interesting to hear how other people are solving fairly common problems in creative and useful ways.

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Hi Brian!

You’re welcome—everyone appreciates it when they receive a potential solution.
The Dyn8 isn’t strictly necessary, though; it really depends on how precisely the filter needs to operate. If, instead of the Dyn8, you use the standard compressor on the control channel (a copy of the vocal channel) and sidechain it to the snare, that can work very well, too. You just need to set fast timing parameters so that it doesn’t remain closed for too long. The gate should also have an appropriate “hold” time so that it can effectively ignore the compressor on the control channel. With a little experimentation, you can use this method to almost completely eliminate the snare signal. This is important for us because we have five vocalists, and otherwise, the unwanted snare bleed would build up significantly in the mix. This way, we can effectively gate it out, ensuring it doesn’t cause any issues elsewhere—(for instance, in the Delay Ducker, which typically monitors the vocals as well).

Allen & Heath could use a similar approach to build an intelligent dynamic filter; I think many users would welcome such a feature, and it would be truly unique.

1 Like
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this is a nice one, then we can say goodbye W. PSE