An example is at 2 minutes into Dorset Perception on Tales of the Inexpressible.

Forcing chopped silence almost as if an inaudible drum beat is cutting the instrumentation and vocals in and out.

Say you have a drone, aaaahhhh. But it’s manipulated to go ahh-ah-ah-ahh.

What is this effect called? 

There might be multiple ways to achieve it, but any recommended software / VST plugin, preferably free that can easily create this effect?

Some kind of program that lets a person use inaudible drum beats or even midi signals?

Hello Rocketdot, nice to meet you
I wish I could help you, but I’m sure someone else will shortly…
May I just take this opportunity, tho, to say something I’ve been wanting to??  I don’t know if it’s quite the same effect Rocketdot talks about, but I have always been quite overcome by what Simon P does in the first track off the bootleg Asnesnothine (I hope I’m not pissing anybody off by possessing that..)—- seems to me he actually made silence itself an instrument, which I find just amazing   I don’t think I can quite find the words for what talent went into that!!

EDIT:  p.s. that is Hallucinogen, for those who didn’t know..

I think the effect is technically called “gating” or “trance gating”
(hope this is the effect you’re referring to)

It’s easy peasy.
All you do is sharply cut the volume (either partially or all the way) repeatedly.
The volume cuts down and up to the beat, creating the effect.

There are vsts for it, but you’re much better off just cutting the volume on the track (via volume envelope) yourself.

hope that helps
And thanks for making me break out Tales of the inexpressible…
haven’t listened to it in a long while… 

What he said ^^^

Ah I have not heard of Asnesnothine.  But this gating effect does seem to be a common trick of Simon’s especially in Shpongle.  Doing it by hand with volume envelopes would most certainly work, I’ll have to try that.  Thank you.

Couple of options with most std DAW software, you can gate the audio - usually using a sidechain to another audio or midi signal, you can get some really interesting rhythmic effects if you use a percussion loop to drive the gate, and tweak the gate effect settings - I use reaper and this is really rather straightforward once you’ve done it the first time.

Another possible which generates a nice pulsing effect is something called ducking where you use a signal to drive a compressor which “quiets” the main audio in line with the signal. Tends to turn up a lot on trance and prog house where the bass is pulsing in time with the kick drum. Again fairly straightforward in the sequencers I’ve used (reaper/ableton and cubase in the dim and distant past).

Alternatively you can also draw the volume envelope manually, which gives you a lot more control, but can take a while depending what you’re trying to do.

Take the result and throw it into some delay and reverb and it gets very spacey

BTW…this is different from the “stutter effect” which you also find out there where the audio does a choppy repeat, but thats another topic :D

All good methods so far.

Also, you could use an arpeggiator with either one or several notes held, minimal decay, sustain and no release if you want a percussive sound.

You could create a smooth transition from the drone to the staccato gated sound by reducing the release with the held note or notes in the arp. 

If you want to use a plug-in, camel space works well. Insert it into your audio/instrument channel, turn on the trance gate and automate the mix.

You could also use a gate plug in, Insert it on an aux pre-fader, sidechain a rhythmic audio/inst track, say hi hats or percussion, adjust the threshold to taste, automate the send, and fade out the volume on your original audio/inst track for a smooth transition.

If you just want an abrupt shift from a drone to rhythmic gating, insert the gate on your audio/inst channel, adjust the threshold, sidechain your rhythmic track and bypass until you want the gated pattern to begin. Make sure to mute your rhythmic trigger unless you want it playing at the same time. it’s usually a good idea to have a separate muted sidechain trigger track and leave the original alone.

i’ve started learning to use reason and this is pretty much the very first effect i tried to re-create. to no avail.

given all this talk about gates it’s clear that i should just focus on learning to use reason first, before trying to attempt anything fancy.

Its a while since I’ve used reason, however from memory routing a signal to the Amp Env of a device is generally a good way of gating it, alternatively the RV reverb has a gate mode which you can trigger pretty much in the same way as outlined above Have fun!

look up DBGlitch or DFX Buffer Override. We use both of those to get that effect. Gating will also work.

almost forgot Sugar Bytes Effectrix, another great gater and fx plug

Check out: High On Mount Kailash (Doof) on Mystery of the Yeti Part 2.
At 3:00 minutes in (to about 5:45) - the coolest uses of this technique. It starts off subtle and builds. I notice it moreso when I am driving and listening - that semi-hypnotic-alert state of mind.

Last but not least (i think) you can bounce your track and load it into a sampler, then route an LFO to your cutoff or volume. May be the easiest way, because you can control the amount of modulation via mod wheel, drum pad, pedal, whatever.

I like to use a free VST effect called Advanced Midi Gate (AMG).  You simply drop it on your sample/instrument/whatever, then route a blank MIDI track to the effect, so that it’s just sending raw MIDI data to the AMG.  For every note on, the audio comes through, for every note off, it cuts out (it can be adjusted for velocity sensitivity, so you can give it some subtle movement and bounce).  It’s great because you can write out longer, more varied gate patterns that other trance-gaters (like Camel Space, as someone mentioned) simply can’t do.  And while automating the volume can give you a larger amount of creative control over your gate patterns, it also makes it a total pain in the ass to tweak the overall volume of the track later in the mixing stage.

Also, the attack, decay and release times can be automated in your DAW for some really cool useful effects that would be next to impossible through volume automation.  Say for instance you have a pad for an ambient section, you start with release time all the way up and it comes through normal.  Then you can fade the release down and turn the pad into a rhythmic synth for when the beat drops.  Or you can open up the attack for a little volume swell at each note on, or bring down the decay for short, percussive bursts.  It also has some panning and filter options, but I don’t find these particularly useful, and will usually just use different dedicated VSTs for stuff like that.

Welcome psilocyborg…you just reminded me of a couple more methods…

So for creative control over gate patterns on the fly, you can also use dummy clips in Live, which is basically an empty audio region with only gate info drawn in, and also the sidechain function for Ultrabeat in Logic triggering your patterns via note, cc, etc. It’s a bit of work as you have to draw in the patterns first, but it works.

i know there’s another thread on this topic, but before i immerse myself in reason, have i made the right app choice for a novice to learn to make electronic music? keeping in mind i’m a mac user, is there a better software that i can use?

i’ve noticed that most other apps can be expanded with plug-ins, whilst reason seems to be a closed environment, so i hope that won’t limit my ability to do cool things with my music…