Jeff Beck is my favorite... his new tech-fusion experiments have guitar pieces that has milliseconds of silence every 64th note (not sure if I am saying it right). Its like the volume is going to zero (silence) crazy fast and coming back up to normal, and then keeps doing this for few bars.
 
Example: "Loose Canon" by Jeff Beck (Album: You Had It Coming) 23rd sec/ 1:42sec "Left Hook" (same album) 14th sec
 
Any idea would be greatly appreciated.
 
Shahed

On my cell here, but the most common way during performance is an actual on/off switch on the guitar to cut the signal (not common) but some dual humbucker setups can achieve this when one volume knob is set to zero (volume knob per pickup) an cycling the pickup selector.

Once inside a DAW there us basically nothing you cannot do to a signal. Volume envelopes, stutter effects, splitting/fading, etc. can achieve the same result as that switch.

I will have to listen to those songs when I get a moment, but think that is what you are hearing.

could be a simple gate on a mic,
or an aggressively set noise suppressor...
 
or even a lo fi effect.
 
i can set my ISP Decimator very high, and get a similar effect

Another way to do this live would be a fast tremolo, something along the lines of running the guitar through a synth with VCA amplitude controlled by step-sequencer or LFO with a rectangular waveform (as classicly demonstrated at a slowish speed by Pete Townshend).

ZVex do a programmable step-sequenced tremolo pedal, and there's other analogue amd digitsl hardware that can pull off really fast tremolo as well. Once a computer gets involved anything is possible of course.

You could do this very easily in Guitar Rig with an LFO set to a pulse wave connected to a volume pedal. 

There's a Groove3 tutorial by Kenny Gioa called Mixing Pop. He has an entire module on how to that. I agree it's a neat trick if done in the right spot.