A one-knob noise gate for guitar, with lookahead. Silence is part of the riff. On a high-gain tone the gaps do as much work as the notes. A tight palm-muted figure is only tight if it actually stops — and that is where most gates let you down. Set one fast enough to close between the chugs and it starts chewing the front off every note; set it slow enough to keep the attack and the noise floor comes breathing back in behind the riff. You end up choosing which half of your tone to sacrifice. MSD Denoiser doesn't make you choose, because it hears the note coming. The audio is delayed a few milliseconds while the detector runs ahead of it, so the gate is already fully open by the time your pick attack lands. That is lookahead, and it is the one thing no gate pedal on the floor can do — a pedal only has the signal that has already reached it. Your DAW is told about the delay and lines the track back up for you. What you hear: the chug keeps its thwack. Staccato figures stop dead instead of trailing off into hiss. And when you hold a note, the gate gets out of the way — the release adapts, so a stab slams shut in a third of a second while a sustained bend is given five whole seconds to ring out. Same knob setting, both behaviours. Where it lives Modern metal and djent rhythm work — the style where gating is part of the sound, and where a gate that eats transients is instantly audible. Thrash, hardcore, death metal — fast muted picking that has to stay articulate. High-gain amp sims at home, which is where noise really bites: laptop fans, cheap interfaces, fluorescent lights, a pedalboard's worth of hiss all stacked up in front of 40 dB of gain. Single coils on a loud stage, hum under the lights, between songs. Doom, stoner and shoegaze rigs carrying big noisy chains, where you want the wall of noise while you play and nothing at all when you stop. It is not only a metal tool — it is just as happy killing hum on a clean funk or country take. But the tight rhythm tone is what it was voiced for. One knob. Set the threshold, forget it. Turn it up until the noise disappears between notes, then back off slightly. That is the whole workflow. Everything else — range, attack, hold, release, lookahead amount, sidechain filter — is already sitting on a tuned value, and the LED ladder under the footswitch shows you exactly how much the gate is doing so you are not guessing in the dark. What makes it different isn't the knobs — it's what was measured. It is not a clone, and it is not ear-tuned. There is no vintage circuit being copied here and no "inspired by" hand-waving. Every release has to pass a headless test harness before it ships: 11 behavioural checks measured on the compiled plugin, plus 19 self-tests whose only job is to prove the measurement code can actually report a failure. A test suite that cannot fail on purpose has never been shown to work. The release adapts to what you played. From one threshold setting, the gate closes in 390 ms after a staccato stab and takes 5360 ms under a sustained note. A fixed release time can only ever be right for one of those — which is why gates usually make you retune the knob when you go from a chugging riff to a held chord. This one reads the playing instead. It listens to the guitar, not to the hum. The detector is RMS with a sidechain high-pass, so mains hum at 50 Hz is rejected by 45.7 dB instead of holding the gate open all night. And 0 gain reversals on a decaying note — no chattering as the signal crosses the threshold. Bypass is honest. Stomp the footswitch and you get the dry signal back sample-exact, with the reported latency unchanged — so bypassing never shifts your track under you. Under the hood — measured at 48 kHz on the shipping build Pick attack lost, 3 ms lookahead 0.31 dB (vs 4.95 dB with lookahead off) Noise floor pushed down 41.6 dB Transparent / 70.0 dB Hard Guitar tail kept vs bypass 91.2% Release, staccato vs sustained 390 ms vs 5360 ms Mains hum at 50 Hz rejected 45.7 dB Gate chatter on a decay 0 reversals Bypassed output vs dry input sample-exact Features One control: Threshold. Hover or drag the knob for the dB readout. Lookahead transient preservation (3 ms), reported to the host as latency. Program-dependent release — adapts to staccato vs sustained playing. RMS detector with sidechain high-pass, so hum does not hold the gate open. Clickable footswitch bypass, also exposed as a host bypass parameter for automation. LED ladder gain-reduction meter, so you can see what the gate is doing. Window sizes 50% / 75% / 100%, right-click the panel. Photoreal pedal interface. System requirements Windows 10 / 11, 64-bit. VST3 host, or run the included Standalone. macOS is not supported in this version. License Use it in your own music, commercial or non-commercial, on machines you own. No redistribution, resale, or reverse-engineering. Provided as-is, no warranty.