Noam Wallenberg explains why a standard noise gate struggles to tighten up a big, sustained kick drum. A gate only closes once the signal falls below its threshold, but a loud kick carries so much low-end energy for so long that it's hard to find a threshold where the gate closes the way you want.
His fix: duplicate the kick track, shift the copy about 30 milliseconds earlier, and feed that signal into the gate's sidechain input on the real kick track. The shifted track stays muted, it's only acting as the gates trigger signal.
Because the trigger fires early, the gate's release setting shuts down the kick's sustain sooner, creating a tighter sound. Nudge the trigger track further ahead and the tail gets even shorter.
This setup also gives you precise control over the attack, which is why many engineers use it for that alone. Even on the shortest attack settings, gates can chew into the transient. With an early trigger, you can set an attack time that lets the gate open fully before the real kick hits, keeping the attack completely transparent.