The Nomad Factory Essential Gate/Expander is a simple plug-in that you’ll find in the Nomad Factory Essential bundle of plug-ins, which is essentially an incredibly cheap way to get a whole bunch of useful plug-ins. This one in particular isn’t hard to use at all as long as you understand the basic premises behind a gate/expander. The parameters that it gives you to work with are fairly straight forward for something like this, as it’s got sliders for threshold, attack, hold, release, and range. It also has VU meters that are programmable to input or output, as well as input and output leveling sliders. It’s definitely a simple plug-in, so I wouldn’t think that a manual would be necessary for most users out there.



SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I’ve got the Nomad Factory Essential Gate/Expander running on my system at home currently. It’s a small rig, but it’s perfect for me to work in the box at home. The rig consists of Pro Tools LE 8 that I run with a Digi 002R audio interface and on a Mac Book Pro that has 4 GB of RAM and a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. None of the plug-ins in the Nomad Essential seem to take up much processing power, or at least I can say I’ve never had a problem with this one or any of the others.


OVERALL OPINION

While simple, the Nomad Factory Essential Gate/Expander is more than capable of getting the job done when you might need something like this. In word of digital audio there of course is much less of a need for a gate than there would be without the luxuries of digital audio editing, but nonetheless there are situations where a gate/expander is needed. This plug-in does the job just about as well as any other that I’ve used. In general the Nomad Factory Essential bundle is absolutely one worth having for home studio owners looking to get a lot of bang for your buck!