How to recreate a guitar noise gate plugin in REAPER

I was doing some research on guitar noise gate plugins, and I came across this really cool one that I wanted to try and replicate in REAPER 🧐

I thought it was clever because it allows you to use your clean DI signal to trigger the noise gate, rather than having it get triggered by all the extra noises that amps tend to make.

The way it works is that you can insert a "splitter" plugin before your amp and a gate plugin after your amp. This essentially splits your signal in two, with one signal going to your amp and the other going to the gate plugin.

By doing this, you can use your clean DI signal to trigger the noise gate, instead of all the noise that an amp can bring up, which may trigger the gate.

I found it to be a really cool technique! So I thought I'd share it with you.

Instructions

I made a going over how to set this up:

Step 1: Add a “splitter” plugin

1. Add ANY plugin before the amp. You can simply load JS: Volume Adjustment and leave it at 0dB. This will serve as your "splitter" plugin.
2. Open the "splitter" plugin from the previous step, and click on "2 in 2 out" at the top right.
3. Ensure that the track channel is set to at least 4.
4. Select output "3 and 4" and check the boxes to send the signal to both. Just like in the image below 👇

Step 2: Add ReaGate

1. Add JS: ReaGate to your track and place it after the amp.
2. Select Auxiliary Input so that the gate listens to the side-chain signal (the DI in this case) instead of the amp.
3. Adjust ReaGate to your preferred values. Here are my settings:

That’s it!

You can save these settings as presets or even as FX templates so it’s always easy to recall. Hope it’s useful! ✨