The Best FREE Gate Expander Plugins for Metal

Getting a tight, aggressive, and clean metal mix often comes down to one thing: control. Specifically, controlling bleed and noise. Tom mics picking up blaring cymbals, fizzy high-gain guitar amps hissing between palm mutes, or unwanted breaths on a screaming vocal track—these are the enemies of a punchy, professional-sounding production.

This is where gates and expanders come in. They’re the essential janitors of your mix, cleaning up the mess so your core sounds can hit with maximum impact. You might think you need some expensive, top-shelf plugin to do this job right, but that's a classic case of what we call Plugin Acquisition Syndrome. The truth is, some of the best and most effective tools for this job are completely free. What really matters isn’t the price tag on the plugin, but knowing how to use it, because true skill will always beat an overflowing VST plugin folder.

Let's dive into some killer free gate expander plugins and, more importantly, how to dial them in to tighten up your metal mixes.

Gate vs. Expander: What’s the Damn Difference?

Before we get into the plugins, let's clear this up. People use these terms interchangeably, but they’re not quite the same.

• A Gate is a brick wall. When the signal drops below a threshold you set, the gate slams shut, muting the sound completely. Think of it as an on/off switch. It’s aggressive and great for completely removing unwanted noise.
• An Expander is a gentle push-down. When the signal drops below the threshold, an expander turns it down by a specific amount (the "range"). It doesn't mute the signal entirely, it just makes the quiet parts quieter. This is often more transparent and natural-sounding than a hard gate.

For most metal applications, you’ll be using them to achieve the same goal: increase the dynamic range between the sound you want and the noise you don’t.

The Best Free Gate Expander Plugins for Your Arsenal

You don’t need to spend a dime to get ruthless dynamic control. Your stock DAW plugins are probably more than capable, but if you're looking for some dedicated free VSTs with a bit of a different flavor or workflow, these are fantastic options.

Cockos ReaGate

If you use Reaper, you already have this powerhouse. If not, you can grab it for free as part of the ReaPlugs VST FX Suite. Don’t let the simple interface fool you; ReaGate is one of the most flexible and powerful gates out there, paid or free.

Why it's great for metal:

Its sidechain filtering is top-notch. This allows you to make the gate "listen" to a specific frequency range to decide when to open. For toms, you can set the sidechain filter to only listen to the low-end "thump" of the drum, ignoring the high-frequency cymbal wash that would otherwise trigger it.

Actionable Tip:

On a tom track, set a fast attack (0-1ms) and a medium release (around 150-250ms) to let the shell's tone ring out. Then, engage the sidechain ("detector input") and use the band-pass filter to zero in on the tom's fundamental frequency, usually somewhere between 80Hz and 250Hz. Now, the gate will open for the tom hit and ignore everything else. It’s surgical precision for free, and a core technique for mixing drums that sound powerful and clean.

GVST GGate

GGate is another simple, no-frills, and incredibly effective free gate plugin. It has the standard Attack, Hold, Release, and Threshold controls, but its clean graphical display makes it easy to see exactly what it's doing to your signal.

Why it's great for metal:

It’s lightweight and CPU-friendly. You can slap it on every drum mic and guitar track without worrying about your session grinding to a halt. It’s a workhorse for cleaning up multi-tracked high-gain guitars.

Actionable Tip:

For chugging, palm-muted guitars, you want to kill the amp hiss between notes. Set a very fast attack (as fast as it goes) to let the pick attack through instantly. Set the release timed to the song's tempo so the gate closes cleanly before the next note. This gives you that machine-gun, percussive rhythm guitar sound popular in modern metal—a key use for a noise gate on metal guitars. It’s a foundational move for getting rhythm guitars right, a topic you can see pros like Will Putney and Kurt Ballou tackle in the Nail The Mix sessions catalog.

Bob Perry Gate

The Bob-Perry-Gate is a classic. It’s a modern re-build of a plugin that many old-school producers loved for its simplicity and musicality. It features a "Range" control that lets it act as either a hard gate (range at -inf) or a gentle expander.

Why it’s great for metal:

Its “Hold” parameter is perfect for shaping drum transients. Using a short hold time (e.g., 10-20ms) after the gate opens can help emphasize the initial crack of a snare drum before the gate starts to close, making it punchier without adding unwanted ring.

Actionable Tip:

Use this on a snare bottom mic. You only want the snappy sound of the snares, not the sympathetic rumble from the rest of the kit. Use a fast attack, a short hold, and a quick release. Blend this tightly gated signal underneath your main snare top mic to add sizzle and articulation without adding mud. It’s a perfect example of how to gate a snare drum for maximum effect.

Advanced Gating Techniques for Brutal Mixes

Having the tool is one thing; knowing the advanced techniques is what separates a decent mix from a crushing one. These are the kinds of tricks you’ll see the best Nail The Mix instructors use all the time.

Sidechaining from Another Source

This is a game-changer. Instead of the track's own signal triggering the gate, you use a different signal. The classic metal kick-and-bass trick is a perfect example.

Put a gate on your bass guitar track. Then, create a send from your kick drum trigger track (or a heavily EQ'd duplicate of your kick mic, boosting the "click") to the gate's sidechain input. Now, the gate on the bass will only open when the kick drum hits. This creates an incredibly tight and interlocked low-end, where the bass and kick drum move as one unit.

Using MIDI to Trigger Gates (The Ultimate Cheat Code)

For the absolute cleanest drum tracks, nothing beats MIDI. If you’ve reinforced your drums with a sampler like Slate Trigger 2, you have a perfect MIDI performance of your drum hits.

Place a gate (like ReaGate, which has a MIDI trigger mode) on your live tom track. Instead of using audio to trigger it, set the gate to open when it receives a specific MIDI note from your drum sampler track. This is the core concept behind using MIDI key spikes to trigger drum gates. The result? The gate opens perfectly in time with the drum hit and closes completely, giving you 100% isolation with zero bleed or false triggers.

When NOT to Use a Gate

Here's the final piece of the puzzle: knowing when to leave things alone. Sometimes, bleed is a good thing. The cymbal wash in your overheads and room mics is part of the "glue" that makes a drum kit sound like a cohesive instrument, not a collection of samples. Trying to gate your room mics is usually a recipe for a choppy, unnatural disaster.

Sometimes, gate chatter (the gate opening and closing rapidly on a signal that's hovering around the threshold) is worse than the noise you're trying to remove. In those cases, it’s often better to just manually edit the audio clip, cutting out the noise between phrases.

Ultimately, plugins are just tools. A gate won't save a bad recording, and a great mix engineer could get stellar results with nothing more than the stock expander that came with their DAW. Your skills in listening and making decisions are what truly matter. Learning how a gate interacts with a compressor or how much gating is too much—that's the real craft.

If you want to go deeper into shaping dynamics, be sure to check out our guides on the basics of compression and how to get maximum impact when you EQ metal guitars. Mastering these tools is how you go from fighting your mix to making it crush.