Hey Simon,

As you can see, the Silencer can take a bit of tweaking to get just right for how you play. How you need to set the controls depends on your playing style and how you’re integrating the pedal into your set up. Details on your pedalboard set up would greatly help but we’ll try and give some guidance here too.

So when it comes to your first issue, you are right, it’s completely the threshold setting and there isn’t really much that can be done on a setting level that will help with gating while you adjust signal from your guitar. turning the gate off for quieter parts is a solution as is placing a volume pedal after the gate. The threshold is set to close the gate (silence the signal) when the input signal drops below a certainly level. If you adjust you guitars volume, you’re more likely to have you guitar’s output be under the threshold for the gate. Just how most is not all gates work.

For your second issue, it just takes some adjustment. It sounds like you might not have the RELEASE knob set low enough. Then RELEASE is turned all the way down, the gate closes in an instant (8mS). It might sound a little choppy at the speed but I’d suggest turning it all the way down and turn it up very slowly to see what feels right. Also, REDUCTION might not be high enough. This usually “feels” natural set between noon and 3 o’clock but you might prefer a higher setting. That all said, if the threshold is set properly, none of it is going to feel right. To set the THRESHOLD, turn THRESHOLD to the minimum, REDUCTION to maximum, and RELEASE to Minimum. That will give you the most extreme gating effect once the Threshold is set to the right setting. Turn the THRESHOLD up until the noise disappears and that should be a good starting point. If the gate seems to remain open a little too long in this setting, turn the threshold up a little bit at a time while testing it out.