Gate-12 The Free & Open-Source Volume Shaper

Tutorial | May 11, 2025

In this video, I demonstrate the new Gate 12 plugin, a free and open source audio gate that now works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, with added features like audio and MIDI triggers, sidechaining, and a paint mode for custom envelopes. I show how to use it in Bitwig to gate a bassline using both audio and MIDI triggers, highlighting its flexibility and ease of use. If you need a feature-rich, cross-platform, and free alternative to plugins like LFO Tool or VolumeShaper, check out Gate 12 via the link in the description.

You can watch the Video on Youtube

• support me on Patreon
• Gate-12 on Github

Summary #

Maybe you don't watch the video, here are some important takeaways:

Hey everyone, welcome back! In this video, I wanted to revisit a plugin I showed you about five years ago, called Gate One. I remember that some of you had complaints about Gate One – mainly that it wasn't available on macOS or Linux, and that it was missing important features like audio triggers and MIDI triggers.

Well, the good news is that the same developer has just released a brand new plugin called Gate 12. This was released literally yesterday or maybe the day before, and it fixes all of those issues and adds a ton of features. It's available now for Windows, macOS, and Linux, so it's cross-platform. One of the biggest improvements is the addition of audio triggers. Now, you can trigger the envelope using any audio source, think about sidechain signals, for example. MIDI trigger functionality is still included, so you can generate envelopes based on MIDI notes. Plus, they've added “paint mode” and a bunch of other features.

And the best part? It's still totally free! You just have to head over to the GitHub repo, go to the Releases section, and download the version for your operating system. There’s support for Windows, macOS, and Linux right now. By the way, CLAP support is on the roadmap as soon as it's officially supported by JUCE, which is mentioned right there on the repo.

To show you how Gate 12 works, I loaded it up in Bitwig. For my demo, I have a simple drum & bass loop, and I wanted to apply some gating to the bass. So, I load up Gate 12 as an insert effect, and visually, it reminds me a lot of LFO Tool, with a display of the audio waveform in the background and the envelope curve you can shape on top.

One big difference from the old plugin is you’re not restricted to a purely LFO-based trigger, you can now use either audio or MIDI triggers. So, instead of a regular LFO, I switched the plugin into audio trigger mode. There are options for “Simple” and “Drums”, I'm not totally sure what the detailed difference is here, but either mode allows you to hook up an audio sidechain (like a drum loop).

To set this up, I created a sidechain input from a drum loop that includes kick, snare, and hi-hats. You can clearly see the detected triggers responding to the kick and snare in the plugin’s visualizer. You also have precise control over the triggers, including threshold and sensitivity settings, so you can tell the plugin to respond only to kicks, or only to snares if you want. There's also an offset parameter, super handy if your kick is a little late or you want to precisely align the gating.

If you prefer, or if your workflow needs it, you can switch Gate 12 to MIDI trigger mode. In this mode, envelope triggering is based on MIDI notes. At first, it triggered from my bass track’s piano roll, but that wasn’t ideal, I wanted separate trigger control. So, I set up a dedicated “trigger” MIDI track with its own pattern to fire the envelope exactly in time with the drum pattern. In Bitwig, this is really easy with the note receiver device. You just route the trigger MIDI notes from the new track into Gate 12 and mute any input from the main bass pattern, so Gate 12 only gets triggers from the track you want.

This approach gives you super clean, perfectly timed gating on the bass, triggered explicitly by whatever MIDI notes you choose, much more precise than relying on audio detection alone.

For those of you familiar with or already owning plugins like Cableguys’ VolumeShaper or LFO Tool, you might wonder why bother. Well, aside from being totally free and open-source (which is a bonus for Linux and Mac users, VolumeShaper, for instance, isn’t available on Linux), Gate 12 is a great alternative. Maybe you’re looking for something cross-platform, free, or open-source, or maybe you just like having options.

There are also cool interface features, like paint mode. You can resize the plugin’s window, enable paint mode, select a brush, and just draw in your own envelope shapes with the mouse. There’s a right-click context menu, too, so you can clear what you’ve drawn or return to “point mode” for more traditional envelope editing with points and curves. You have full envelope controls (attack, release, curve tension, etc.), phase shifting, and clock sync, among other advanced features, so it’s much more versatile than the old Gate One.

So, overall, with all these features, cross-platform support, and being free and open-source, I think this is a fantastic addition to anyone’s plugin collection. I included the GitHub link in the video description so you can try it out yourself.

Let me know what you think in the comments below! If you found this helpful, give it a like and subscribe, it really helps out the channel. Thanks for watching, have a great Sunday evening, and see you in the next video!

Transcription #

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by AI, so it might not be perfect. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.
You can also click on the timestamps to jump to the right part of the video, which should be helpful.

[00:00:00] Yo, folks, welcome back.
[00:00:01] So five years ago, I showed you a plug in called gate one.
[00:00:06] And some people complained this is actually not available on Mac OS and Linux and it kind
[00:00:11] of misses audio triggers and MIDI triggers and so on.
[00:00:15] So the same guy just released a new plug in called gate 12.
[00:00:19] So he released this yesterday or two days ago.
[00:00:23] And it has all the features in there.
[00:00:25] So we have now here cross platform support available on Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
[00:00:30] We have audio triggers now so we can just use an audio source, sidechain signal or whatever
[00:00:36] to trigger the envelope.
[00:00:39] MIDI support is still in there so we can use notes to trigger the envelopes and paint modes
[00:00:44] and additional features, a lot of stuff here.
[00:00:48] And it's still free and all you have to do is go here to the GitHub repo and then go
[00:00:53] to releases and just download your version Linux, Mac OS and Windows.
[00:00:59] Clap support is coming.
[00:01:03] It says down here somewhere, clap is planned when there is official juice support.
[00:01:09] So I want to show you this, how it looks like in Bitwig here.
[00:01:13] So we have here some kind of random jump base loop, right now I want to put here some kind
[00:01:21] of gating on the base.
[00:01:25] So let's call up here gate 12.
[00:01:28] So and this looks like LFO tool here.
[00:01:31] It's just modulating the volume can also see nicely in the background, the audio waveform.
[00:01:39] So we want to trigger this instead of having here an LFO.
[00:01:42] So we switch this here to audio and we can choose between simple and drums.
[00:01:48] I don't know exactly what the difference is here.
[00:01:52] But then we can also open up here the settings to the audio trigger and we get some kind
[00:01:57] of visual information about the trigger.
[00:02:03] We have also or we need to actually bring in here the drum loop.
[00:02:08] Let's use this.
[00:02:09] So it's just a drum loop.
[00:02:10] So it's a kick drum snare and hi-hats combined, right?
[00:02:16] And we have to enable your side chain.
[00:02:19] And you can see here the drum loop and it's also already detecting here the triggers.
[00:02:26] It's the kick and the snare at the same time.
[00:02:29] So what we can do now, first we have to bring in here a different, let's activate snap.
[00:02:38] So this is the envelope we want to trigger just to duck the base.
[00:02:43] So we pull down here the hi-hats, we just get out stuff from the snare drum.
[00:02:52] Bring up here the threshold, bring up the sense.
[00:03:09] Can also monitor here the side chain.
[00:03:11] You can see we get only a trigger now at the kick drum.
[00:03:15] So the good thing about this is that we can also use an offset here.
[00:03:18] So sometimes if you think the kick drum is too late or it triggers too late the envelope,
[00:03:24] you can just bring this here into a negative offset.
[00:03:33] In my opinion it works well.
[00:03:42] So we can use audio to trigger the envelope here and we have a lot of tools to single
[00:03:48] out certain events inside of this audio signal.
[00:03:53] We can also switch this here to MIDI, so now we can use MIDI to trigger the envelope.
[00:03:58] And at the moment we use or it receives MIDI from the piano roll.
[00:04:03] So it's the pattern or the drum, the bass pattern itself.
[00:04:08] You can see each note for the bass triggers basically this envelope, which is not what
[00:04:16] we want.
[00:04:17] So what we want is we want to create here a new audio track and let's call this trigger
[00:04:26] and we put some notes on there.
[00:04:28] So this is a basic two step drum bass beat.
[00:04:31] So this is kick drum one, kick drum two, right?
[00:04:34] So we want to use this.
[00:04:36] So on the bass track we don't need to use here the sidechain anymore.
[00:04:41] This is only for audio input.
[00:04:44] So in Bitwig, I don't know how it is in other doors, but in Bitwig you can just use a note
[00:04:50] receiver in front of the VST.
[00:04:54] And we also mute all the notes coming from in front of the note receiver, which is here
[00:05:00] the bass pattern.
[00:05:01] We just want to mute this and we only want to receive notes from the trigger track.
[00:05:09] And now we have to hit play here.
[00:05:13] You can see this now triggers this envelope.
[00:05:20] It's probably much cleaner.
[00:05:21] I have no idea.
[00:05:23] I guess it's cleaner because you have exactly at the right point the right trigger.
[00:05:30] So this also works.
[00:05:31] So we can use MIDI or notes inside of Bitwig to trigger this envelope.
[00:05:37] And I guess you already know or already own cable guys, volume, shape or LFO tool.
[00:05:46] A lot of people have this already, but maybe you don't or you need Linux or Mac support
[00:05:53] or whatever.
[00:05:54] You want to use something that's completely free or you want to use it because it's open
[00:05:59] source.
[00:06:00] I have no idea.
[00:06:02] I think it's great to have this.
[00:06:07] There's also your paint mode.
[00:06:08] So if you enable this, we can also resize by the way, there's a paint mode and we have
[00:06:13] some brushes here.
[00:06:15] So we can use this and then click and drag to resize it.
[00:06:21] And then we just paint a brush like this.
[00:06:28] So this is the paint mode.
[00:06:37] Kind of neat.
[00:06:38] You can also right click and say clear, go back to normal point mode is curve.
[00:06:45] So we want to have here something, you want to pull this down, you want to have this here
[00:06:53] and a slight curve.
[00:06:55] And again, all the features here, we can change the face.
[00:06:58] We can change the tension easily, release attack release just to get some clicks out
[00:07:04] of the result.
[00:07:05] You can change the synchronization here.
[00:07:08] Also does a lot of stuff in here that's not in gate one and it's still free.
[00:07:13] So the link is in the description below if you want to try it out for yourself.
[00:07:17] I think it's a great plug in.
[00:07:18] It works great and it's completely free.
[00:07:22] So why not?
[00:07:23] So let me know what you think in the comments down below.
[00:07:25] Leave me a like, leave me a subscription and I'll see you in the next video.
[00:07:30] Have a great Sunday evening.
[00:07:32] Bye.
[00:07:33] [BLANK_AUDIO]