Gating a 386

[black mariah]

Quite by accident I'm working on a nice little noisemaker and I've run into a problem. I need to gate the input so the 386 will shut up. It's generating a constant tone with the guitar volume up, but I want it to act more like a Jawari, with the fast decay. I *THINK* all I need to do to get this working the way I want it is to come up with a way to gate the input. Any thoughts?

What's awesome is that even though this thing makes ungodly noise, I can crank a pot and turn the noise off and have a rather nice distortion too.  

*EDIT*
It's a regular Radio Shack LM386-N if that makes any difference.

[black mariah]

All I need is a way to stop any signal from getting through when I'm not playing. Anyone? :oops:

[niftydog]

search the forum for references to noise gates or envelope detectors etc etc. THis should give you some clues.

[black mariah]

Did that. I ran across one post that details a simple 386 based gate, but I'm having a hard time understanding part of it. Check out the last post here:

http://diystompboxes.com/sboxforum/viewtopic.php?t=19059&highlight=simple+noise+gate

I'm not understanding how the transistor hooks up, and I have no clue why the LED hooks up to the +V. I've sat here and drawn this out a couple of times, but it is making no sense to me. This seems similar to the way the Uglyface works, but I'm finding it quite confusing. Eh, at least I'm understanding it up to that point.  :lol: