Production Technique #4
Gated Vocal
A gated or “stuttering” vocal is a popular technique used in trance music.
I am going to detail in this blog post how I took this vocal track…
And transformed it into this…
https://soundcloud.com/two_shaymusic/stutter
There are actually quite a few ways to skin this cat. Near-neighbor Tom Cosm, details three in his excellent video below.
The Method
I am going to focus on one of those methods, namely, using a secondary MIDI track (secondary to the primary vocal track) to send information to a gate placed on my vocal track.
The first thing I did, is select a gate plugin and insert it onto my vocal track. I chose to use FabFilter’s Pro-G, but any gate will do.
Next I opened up the gate and activated the side-chain, selecting the external side-chain source. FabFilter’s plugins require a bit of extra routing to use inside your DAW, but fortunately there is a self-explanatory guide which helps set up this dark magic.

Next, I created a pattern inside my MIDI track to act as the source for my gate; this pattern is the groove so spend some time here getting it right.

Finally, I adjusted the gate’s parameters, focusing on the attack, release and threshold settings. This experimentation works much like a compressor and the right balance is source dependent. Once I established a good balance of settings, I flicked through the gate modes and settled on “ducking” instead of the default “clean.”

This is not the only, nor the easiest way to achieve this result. However, I like this method as I can really micro-manage my MIDI clip and get precise results.
