Revv G8 Noise Gate

The Revv G8 is a noise gate pedal from Canadian amplifier maker REVV, released in October 2021 as the company's first non-gain pedal¹²³. A noise gate mutes or attenuates your signal when you stop playing, so hum, hiss and high-gain feedback from a loud amp or a gain-heavy pedalboard do not come through in the gaps. Revv describes the G8 as a transparent gate engineered for "surgical noise reduction that removes the hum, hiss & high-gain feedback without damaging your guitars natural characteristics"¹.

What makes the G8 stand out among gate pedals is where its circuit came from: Revv took the gate out of its Generator 120 MK3 amplifier head and put it in a pedalbox⁴. It is an analog design with three knobs and a send/return loop, and it can be wired as simply as any two-jack gate or as precisely as a four-cable setup¹⁵.

What it does

A noise gate sits in your signal chain and closes when your signal drops below a level you set, cutting the noise floor of a high-gain rig between phrases. The G8 gives you that function with three controls, Hold, Release, and Threshold, plus a send/return loop, which is the feature that separates it from simple two-knob gates⁸⁷⁴.

The controls: Threshold, Hold and Release

The G8 has three knobs, and each addresses a different part of how a gate behaves⁸⁷.

Guitar World's launch coverage added detail on the Hold knob: it "makes subtle adjustments, and ensures the gate remains open whenever the user wants and needs it to be"⁶. In practice, Threshold is the coarse setting that decides how loud a signal must be to keep the gate open, Hold smooths the transition so sustained notes do not get chopped mid-decay, and Release sets whether the cutoff sounds like a hard mute or a gentle fade.

Power and connections

The G8 runs on a 9 to 12V center negative external power supply only, drawing 50mA minimum¹. There is no battery option.

Its four 1/4 inch jacks support what Revv calls 4-cable side-chain routing¹. Delicious Audio described the flexibility at launch: the "4 jacks allow super simple 2-cable setups or sonically precise 4-cable setups"⁵.

• Two-cable setup: guitar into the input, output to the amp. The gate works like any simple inline pedal⁵.
• Four-cable setup: guitar into the input, output to the amp's input, send to the amp's effects loop send, return from the amp's effects loop return. This separates the detection point from the cutting point, so the gate can track your clean guitar signal while cutting noise after your gain stages¹⁵.

The four-cable method is the same approach used with other loop-equipped gates such as the Boss NS-2, and it is what makes a gate effective on a high-gain amp where the noise is generated after the guitar signal.

History: the gate from the Generator 120 MK3

The G8's circuit is not a fresh design. Revv's product pages say it was "extracted from the legendary REVV G120," and press coverage agrees: Gearnews wrote that "Revv took the gate circuit out of its Generator 120 MK3 head and put it in a box" with Threshold, Hold and Release plus a send/return loop¹⁴. Guitar Player's guide calls it a gate "based on the revered gate from the REVV Generator 120 MK3 top unit"³.

Revv says the pedal only happened because players liked the amp's gate so much: "We weren't really planning on designing a gate until the response to Generator 120 MK3's gate was so positive." Designer Dan Trudeau then "quickly got to work on expanding that gate's featureset into a standalone pedal"⁸.

Size and build

Revv's product pages give two different dimension sets for the G8: one page lists 5" x 2.875" x 2"¹, while the Canadian Edition page lists 2.75" wide, 4.75" deep and 1.25" high⁸. Weight is listed at 0.7lbs¹. Either way it is a compact enclosure, finished in a black metallic graphic enclosure per the launch coverage⁵. It is manufactured in Canada¹⁵.

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