Noise gates are essential in the modern home studio. All those computers, monitors, and other electronic gear can make a lot of noise through your guitar pickups. Line 6 Helix makes it easy to put a noise gate on your signal. The traditional Line 6 method is to use a noise gate effect or block near the beginning of your signal chain. This is still possible with Line 6 Helix but there’s a better way. Line 6 Helix has a noise gate built directly into the guitar input block. The performance of this gate is identical to the “Noise Gate” block you can add to the processing chain. Adding the gate to your guitar input saves a Helix processing block which gives you more room for other types of effects. I doubt there’s any Helix DSP savings doing it this way. The gate sound and performance is the same so the DSP cost is likely identical. What it saves is a DSP block you could use for something else.
In the video I show how to access this input gate and how to assign footswitches to turn your noise gates on/off.
Background music is from my Malhavok album.