As well as using a gate with any amp sim, I tend to trim any periods of silence by splitting the clips.

I do this on most audio clips, in fact.

Sometimes I use the PC 4K Gate before the amp sim too.

There are several ways...A Track Volume Envelope, inserted at the Clips pane in the track view. allows you to place dots on the line and lower the volume off at points where you have the noise in blank areas of the track. However when you insert an envelope it is there and does not allow you to use the fader in the mix area of the tune.
 
I prefer to just do a "Split" on the track, right before the solo, and right after the solo. Highlight the track or tracks you want to split, right click and "Split", the track. Then highlight, right click, and "Cut" the areas where you want silence. Afterwards, you can then fine tune by dragging the track to the first and last note of the solo. If for some reason you want this to be a full length track even with the blank areas? After you cut all the unwanted areas out of the track, Bounce it to a new track, and that will fix that. This method doesn't invlove having the envelope control the fader.
 
The Gate in the Master Pane of the TH2 can help a bit, but as mentioned it is a hard gate and can interrupt the effect if not carefully adjusted.

In reference to rsinger, how do you "automate the fader"? I tried a couple things, but not sure about the steps....

He is talking about using a volume envelope. There are a couple of videos about automation in X2 at Cake TV.

Yeah, the volume envelope.

Beepster
It just needs to be set very very carefully. One little bit too much or too little and yeah... it won't be so great. It is a very hard gate.

I was using the master panel, but, as you say, it's a very hard gate. I wasn't really careful with it, just played with it a bit and wasn't real happy with it. Although it seems to work fine at lower settings if the amps aren't too distorted.

The stuff I've done is very heavily distorted and until I found that Master panel and the gate I was like "WTF? This is useless!" because of the crazy noise. Once I got at that gate though and figured out how to set it properly things were fine. It will however cut off lead ins and ring outs to notes if not set perfectly for what's being played so I set it based on the part about to be recorded.
 
scook does have me thinking about automation though but perhaps in a different way than is his intention. I usually trim everything anyway so I realize now after I do that I could ease up on the gate a bit but if there ends up being small sections of "silence" I could just boost it back up again at those points. For the most part though when I'm playing at those kinds of screecher levels I'm relentless so there won't be much silence in the first place.
 
I do need to figure out the right Post/Pre settings for my fades in regards to the FX bins or whatever though because I lose signal to the effect and it sounds kind of lame.

Beepster
 
scook does have me thinking about automation though but perhaps in a different way than is his intention. I usually trim everything anyway so I realize now after I do that I could ease up on the gate a bit but if there ends up being small sections of "silence" I could just boost it back up again at those points. For the most part though when I'm playing at those kinds of screecher levels I'm relentless so there won't be much silence in the first place.
 
 

Nope, automating the gate as you describe is exactly what I was thinking although I have not bothered to automate the gate myself. I usually use a very light setting on the Master gate and deal with any noisy bits that get though with a combination of the PC gate/expander and envelopes (mostly envelopes).

Now that I know how to actually use some of those PC gates/comps/etc there will definitely be some fiddling around. It did kind of strike me though that OPs main issue was that he was getting nasty hiss and noise as he tracked and didn't really want to deal with it until he hit the edit/mixing phase which is understandable and the built in gate would certainly fix that with little effort. Man... I wish things weren't so freaking whack around here right now. I've got no time to play around with all these ideas anymore.

The gate in the master area of the TH2 works very effectively. Thanks for everyone's help. What a difference it makes. It was off before and just turning it on to the first position made a significant change for the better...