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applied to the gate is effectively clipped by the bandwidth of your ear as you listen to the output
signal.
We wanted to ensure musicians could quickly get to a nominal setting, with no clipping of the
all-important EG profile as well as ensuring no bleed. This means the gate will both fully close and
fully open. This is provided by turning the OPEN slider fully down and the CTRL attenuverter set to
the ZERO setting (zero indicator will illuminate) with MATERIAL in the uppermost position.
Natural Gate also allows the musician to control how far it will open - an upper limit. By normalling a
DC voltage to the CTRL input jack, the CTRL attenuverter allows the CTRL signal to sweep both
negative and positive. If you set the CTRL attenuverter CCW of 12 o'clock, you can reduce the
minimum closure level of the gate. This also limits how far the gate will open. You can use CTRL to
great effect adding frequency-dependent dynamics to your events or to simply roll-off some
high-end for a quieter, smoother, less aggressive sound. It is very handy to use both HIT and CTRL
simultaneously. Now you can apply CTRL, along with HIT to vary how open the gate is under CV
control and not be 'stuck' always fully opening the gate when a HIT comes in. And because reducing
the closure (shifting the envelope down) also affects the apparent decay length, you now have a
secondary method to adjust the decay profile. Negative CTRL values reduce the apparent minimum
decay length of the gate even shorter and removes/clips some of the long ringing tail of the
envelope for a more abrupt sort of damping.
How a hit event sounds is largely due to the material you are striking. Stick to wood, hand to skin,
felt mallet to head... they all sound different. This is realised with the MATERIAL switch. The
MATERIAL settings alter two parameters: the attack and amplitude of the envelope signal feeding
the gate, which by nature of how Natural Gate works, also affects the frequency content of the
resulting signal.
Natural Gate's envelopes are very interesting. They have lots of energy up front with a sharp initial
decay - much sharper than the simple exponential RC discharge profiles found in nearly all other EGs,
then the envelope starts to level off, decaying v ery gradually. The ringing gets soft and quiet as it
slowly fades away. This is what gives the gate its more natural plucky sort of decay but with the
ability to have it ring nicely like a finely-made drum. You may extract this envelope at the OUTput
jack(s) by leaving the INput(s) unplugged for use around the rest of your modular system. These
envelopes are unique to only the Natural Gate and are 1:1 in time with Natural Gate's internal gate
stages when applied to other e xponential CV inputs.
Voltage controllable decay took lots of crafting to get right. Natural Gate simply doesn't stretch or
shrink a common envelope shape. That doesn't work for our musical goal. As stated earlier, short
things have different shapes than long ones after normalising them. We have addressed this directly
by having separate shapes for long decays and short decays with each carefully crafted to sound
perfect. This means any decay setting still sounds natural. This may not be obvious at first but
Natural Gate has a lot going on behind the panel to make this and all of the other features work
towards our goal.
Finally we'd like to reiterate that Natural Gate is not a 'vactrol emulation' module. Natural Gate has
no vactrols whatsoever nor does it try to recreate this devices. Why? To us, a vactrol doesn't really
represent closely enough what we think nature sounds like. So they were immediately thrown out; as
we do not design as slaves to components, we design to accomplish a musical goal, t hen find which
components and designs will get us there. Vactrols are silly, sloppy components that should only be
used in the most particular applications (or, really, never at all - they are bad for the environment,
have lots of drift and temperature dependence, have poor matching, and their performance
degrades over time). Natural Gate's intent is not to model any other LPG's characteristics... and it
doesn't.
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