Is my Horizon Devices Precision Drive defective or am I just stupid (noise gate)

[TheSchaeff]

Hey guys!

Horizon Devices was pretty responsive over support e-mails for a while but for whatever reason has now gone radio silent.
I obviously don't expect the sevenstring forums to provide free customer support for someone else's product but there is a chance that maybe I just don't understand the point of this built-in noise gate and I've unintentionally created all of this headache myself.

The Horizon Devices Precision Drive contains these controls:

One big selling point of it is the built-in noise gate. When the light is on, this signals the gate is closed. When the light is off, the input has passed the threshold and opened the gate. Turning the knob changes the threshold for the gate. Pretty straightforward. In any demonstration I've seen of it, official or otherwise, no additional noise gate is used or mentioned.

My problem is that the noise gate does not seem to actually gate/reduce any noise. All of the minor incidental sounds like soft taps or string brushing are equally present with the pedal on or off while the light signals that the gate should be closed. What it does seem to affect is what is passed into the overdriven tone. If any sound is above the threshold that causes the gate to open, the overdriven tone kicks in. Any sound below that threshold however still comes through as if the pedal was being bypassed altogether.

The result when playing is that if the noise gate is too low all of those incidental sounds get overdriven, but if the noise gate is cranked to max those incidental sounds still come through quite clearly, just not overdriven. Nuking the volume and cranking the drive technically "fixes" this problem but at the obvious cost of killing the tone. Tried different cables, different guitars (in different tunings), and into different interfaces. Tried both on a 9-volt battery and on the officially recommended AC adaptor. All the knobs and general functionality seem to work exactly as intended, not counting this specific quirk.

Is this an expected result? It seems like an unnecessary hassle to have to add an additional noise gate before or afterwards (set precisely to exclude only the non-overdriven tone) to clean up stuff that a pedal with a "built-in noise gate" shouldn't be passing through in the first place, imo. If I don't understand the point of this noise gate I'm happy to take the L on this one, I just want to make sure I'm not making things unnecessarily difficult for myself by assuming something is working as intended when it isn't. I've tried my hardest over the past 1-2 months to figure it out but either I'm the only one with a defect or I'm the only one who doesn't understand what the noise gate is for because I've got no leads. Thanks in advance for any insight.

 

[crushingpetal]

This noise gate seriously attenuates the signal but doesn't completely eliminate it. I actually prefer it this way because it doesn't destroy all of the initial transient.

So, yes, if I carefully move my fingers over the strings I'll get some noise coming through, but it's very attenuated. It sounds like your pedal isn't broken, you just don't like the gate. It's actually perfect for my needs---I want a very subtle gate---but I can see why not everyone would.

My guess is that they tried to undercook the gate so more people could use it. Given that it only has one knob they could have made it much worse.

 

[TheSchaeff]

Hmm. I don't expect the noise gate to completely eliminate the signal, but I wouldn't call what I'm getting "seriously attenuated" (I recognize that is of course subjective).

This isn't super scientific but I did a bit of a test. Just gonna post waveforms but I can upload the wav somewhere if anyone wants to hear it.
I have the pedal dialed in roughly to their recommended settings:

Using a basic amp+cab setup in my AxeFX II XL+ (input gate disabled and no other blocks in the chain) with my guitar running into the pedal which then runs into the front instrument port of the AxeFX. Recording directly into Audacity, I start with the pedal bypassed.
I gently place and lift my right palm on the strings between the pickups while my left hand mutes the strings on the fretboard. Halfway through (marked by the red line) I turn the pedal on and repeat this process with the same intensity. The signal is obviously not loud enough to open the gate, so all of this is happening while the gate is closed.

Top and bottom tracks are the same, I just stitched the amplitude (top) and db (bottom) views together in photoshop.
(Note: I normalized the track to make the waveform more visible but both the pedal on and off takes were recorded to the same track so their relative volumes are intact)

The signal is indeed being attenuated. However, it doesn't seem like it's being attenuated by much.
Although again I do accept that the purpose/effectiveness of this gate is ultimately subjective.

 

[owlexifry]

your description makes it sound like the gate allows dry signal to pass through when it should be passing the coloured/overdriven signal..

that’s weird.

or maybe the gate just isn’t very good.

imo combo things like this are pedal are a gimmick. (maybe just let overdrives be overdrives and gates be gates?)

if you want a gate that isn’t shit, go and try an ISP Decimator ProRack G if you can.

 

[narad]

It's maybe a gimmick compared to what you can achieve with a more professional setup and independent pedals for each of those, but it's a really solid pedal to grab when you don't want that complexity. I don't find the gate to be a gimmick, even though it's not at ISP levels, a little gating is really helpful when you're boosting high gain amps.

 

[lattjeful]

Nah that's just how the PD gate is. It's basically strong enough to kill the added noise from slamming the amp really hard + a little bit beyond that, but that's about it. I like it because I kinda prefer a subtle gate, but others don't. I only use a separate gate if I'm doing something stupid like hitting a high gain amp with a fuzz or something lol.

If you want things open and shut, then get a separate gate.

 

[TheWarAgainstTime]

I had a Precision Drive for a while and will echo what others have said regarding the "strength" of the gate. It won't do the on/off/start/stop thing, but it will at least counteract the additional noise floor that the overdrive portion of the pedal adds.

If memory serves, the gate portion of the circuit comes after the overdrive itself, so it "hears" your boosted/overdriven signal and reacts to that rather than just your dry DI like if it were placed in front of the overdrive.