A creative trick that the DS201 tackles extremely well is gating one sound from another. This has become known as the 'Shamen sound', since they appear to like it a lot, but you can use it successfully on many styles of music. If you take a look at your DS201, you'll notice a switch on the left of the front panel called 'Key Source'. The key is the signal that opens the gate, and in normal operation it will be the same signal that you're gating. But it doesn't have to be - you can send one signal through the gate and use a completely different signal to switch the gate on and off, and you can automate it via MIDI even though the DS201 doesn't have a single 5-pin DIN. Let's try an example...

Let's suppose you have a track half-finished on your multitrack tape, on which you have timecode or a sync track. Strap on your battered old guitar and plug it into a fuzz box (or set your multi-effects unit to a distortion preset, if you want to be posh). Record chords that change only in line with the melody/harmony, one chord per change of harmony, without introducing any rhythm at all. Now get out your drum machine and create a closed hi-hat pattern in any rhythm you choose. It doesn't have to be hi-hats but the hi-hat sound is suitably short. Synchronise the drum machine (or sequencer) to the tape and get it playing along in time to the music. I'll assume that you are already familiar with synchronising this type of equipment and you don't have any problems achieving this.

• Patch the guitar track through the noise gate.
• Patch the output from the drum machine supplying the hi-hat sound to the Key input of the same channel of the gate.
• Switch the key source to 'Ext' and set everything in motion.

You'll find that the guitar sound is chopped up into the rhythm of the hi-hat. You may need to adjust the Threshold setting from the starting position to get this working cleanly, but you won't be far away. To fine tune the effect you may want to adjust the Attack, Hold and Decay. Since the hi-hat is a very short sound (at least, I hope you used a short one) you shouldn't have any trouble with jitter, and you'll have complete freedom to set the envelope of the guitar sound according to the needs of the track. If you set a long Attack, you might need to advance the hi-hat so the gate opens a little bit earlier. Hold, you will find, sets the length of time the gate will stay fully open, after which it will close abruptly. Decay sets the time it takes for the gate to go between fully open and fully closed once the level of the triggering signal has descended below the Threshold. This allows you to experiment with various envelope shapes; gates with no Hold control are a little more restrictive in this department.

But what if you don't synchronise MIDI equipment to tape? How can you achieve a similar effect? Well, you could always open and close the gate manually. Just patch a synth into the key input. A sustained sound at a constant level with a quick attack and decay will give you a switch with which you can open and close the gate at will - more convenient and quieter than using a console's muting or routing switches. Or you can try something a little more clever:

• Find, among the drum tracks on the tape, a drum with a suitable rhythm - maybe the bass drum for starters. It's probably better if it's by itself and not mixed in with anything else, but it's not the end of the world if it isn't.
• Feed this into a digital delay and adjust the delay and feedback controls so that you get repeat echoes in time with the track.
• Now apply these repeat echoes to the Key input of the gate.

You will have to fiddle around with the Threshold of the gate and the degree of feedback applied to the echoes, but you should find that this triggers the gate quite nicely and chops up your guitar chords into a pattern of eighth or sixteenth notes. Producing a particular rhythm with this technique might not be possible in the same way as when you synchronise a drum machine, but there are still lots of things you can do - and we're not finished yet. - more