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How to Set a Noise Gate Without Clipping Words
Heshan Fernando
Co-founder & COO
You add a gate to a voice recording and the room hum disappears from the gaps. Then you listen properly and every sentence ends slightly early — the trailing consonants are being cut, and the whole thing sounds clipped.
That’s not the threshold. It’s the timing, and it’s the setting people adjust last.
What each control does
Threshold is the level above which the gate opens. Set between the noise floor and the quietest wanted signal.
Attack is how fast it opens once the signal crosses the threshold. For voice, fast — 1 to 5 milliseconds. Slow attack chews the front off consonants.
Hold is how long it stays open after the signal drops below the threshold, before release begins. This is the control that saves word endings.
Release is how gradually it closes after the hold expires. Fast release sounds abrupt; slow release lets some noise back in.
The clipped-words problem is almost always hold and release being too short. A trailing “s” or a breath tail falls below the threshold while the phrase is still finishing, and a gate with a 20 millisecond release slams shut on it.
Lengthening hold to 100-150 ms and release to 200-300 ms fixes it, and costs you a little noise at the end of each phrase — which is a much better trade than clipped speech.
Setting the threshold from measurement
Guessing wastes time. Measure two numbers:
The noise floor — the level during a silent passage. Room tone, preamp hiss, air conditioning.
The quietest speech — not the loudest, the quietest. Usually a soft aside or the end of a sentence.
The threshold goes between them, and the gap tells you whether gating will work at all. With a noise floor at -52 dB and speech at -18 dB, there’s 34 dB of room and a threshold around -40 dB has comfortable margin either side.
If the gap is under about 10 dB, the recording is too noisy for a gate to help cleanly. That’s a signal to fix the source or use noise reduction instead.
| Control | Voice setting | Symptom if wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Threshold | Between floor and quietest speech | Chatter, or noise passes through |
| Attack | 1-5 ms | Consonant starts chewed |
| Hold | 100-150 ms | Word endings cut |
| Release | 200-300 ms | Abrupt, or noise leaks back |
Chatter and hysteresis
If the signal hovers near the threshold, the gate opens and closes rapidly — a fluttering artefact called chatter.
Two fixes. A longer hold prevents rapid reopening. Hysteresis — where the gate closes at a lower level than it opens at — means a signal has to fall further before the gate shuts, which stops it oscillating around a single point. Most gates offer one or both.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Raising the threshold to remove more noise, which starts gating quiet speech.
- Setting a fast release because it looks tidier on a meter.
- Gating before removing a constant hum — a notch filter or noise reduction handles steady tones better, and the gate only has to deal with the gaps.
- Using a gate on a recording where the noise floor and the speech are close together, which no timing settings will rescue.
- Applying the same settings across different speakers in one session.
How to do it with Noise Gate Tool
The Noise Gate Tool sets a threshold from your measured levels.
- Measure the noise floor during silence and the level during normal speech.
- Let the threshold sit between them with margin on both sides.
- Set attack fast and hold and release generously.
- Listen specifically to the ends of phrases — that’s where a gate reveals itself.
Other audio tools are in the tools directory.
Frequently asked questions
Why does gating cut off the ends of words?
Because release is too short. Trailing consonants and breath tails fall below the threshold before the phrase is really over. Lengthen hold and release rather than lowering the threshold.
What is chatter?
The gate opening and closing rapidly when the signal hovers around the threshold. Hysteresis and a longer hold both fix it.
Is a gate better than noise reduction?
They solve different problems. A gate silences the gaps and does nothing during speech; noise reduction removes noise throughout but can introduce artefacts. For hum under a voice, doing both gently beats either aggressively.
Final thought
Set the threshold from measured levels, then spend your time on hold and release. The threshold decides whether the gate works; the timing decides whether anyone notices it.