Recording guitar with a gate or not?

[Rosco]

I normally track guitar with ISP decimator at 11 o'clock into hi gain red channel of evhiii 5150.
This is fine but I'd like to eliminate the amp noise so I'm thinking of running a boss ns-2 by the 4 cable method.

Has anyone used this method in the studio?
Any other suggestions?

[ochoill]

I see people running the 4 cable method regularly and they swear by it.  Sort of depends on a lot of factors as to what level of reduction you'll get but as a general rule, if you are using pedals, you would want to put all your dirt in the same loop as the amp for most clarity.  If you fancied a bit of overkill you could run the decimator immediately after your guitar and before everything else too 

I have an EHX silencer on my board and have ran 4 cable + pedals with that before, it's great, but I ended up changing it to running only my dirt pedals for setups now because it's both easier live and I use two amps for practically everything (live and recording, same board worked for both).

[Bürggermeister]

You could apply a noise gate to your recorded track while mixing instead. That way, you can tweak as required for each track. You won't be committed to a particular setting which you can never undo afterwards if you ever had need to.

X-noise by Waves is cool, it allows you to apply a gate based on the actual noise pattern you're trying to get rid of, very tweakable.

[Rosco]

Nice I'll look into x-noise.
It's a fine line with noise reduction and damaging/squashing tone.
Reducing gain is not an option   

[ochoill]

You won't be committed to a particular setting which you can never undo afterwards if you ever had need to.

Slightly off topic but this is a thing that absolutely killed me for years and made me never finish a single thing, this whole concept, I had option paralysis too bad and couldn't get around never finding the "perfect" tone.  Absolutely unable to commit to a sound.  I dunno how lads do it.  My only escape was to give up and stick 2x SM57s on my rig and be done with it.  Any tweaking is done there and only a bit of EQing/panning in the DAW, otherwise I play live/demo/jam/actually record using the same setup.

...I do still want that waves plugin though because it sounds handy.

It's a fine line with noise reduction and damaging/squashing tone.
Reducing gain is not an option   

It's a tough balance and what sounds good in a room doesn't necessarily record the same way.  Luckily I fuckin love feedback 

[Bürggermeister]

I just accepted that most of the stuff I like the sound of is full of mistakes and noise and shite, so I got much more tolerant of not chasing Andy Sneap 

[Floss]

Id never track distorted guitars through a gate personally -  i prefer to leave all the hiss and noise in there and make the edits manually (in Cubase in my case).  A bit more work - but safer I think.