New Music Gear Monday: Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate Plugin

Ahhh, gates. We love them and we hate them. They always almost seem to do the job, but never quite 100%, especially on drums. Chatter, mis-detection, choked and lost ghost notes are more the norm than not. But that was before the Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate, which takes gating to a whole new level when trying to clean up the instrument’s tracks.

The Oxford Drum Gate uses an intelligent detection algorithm to tell the difference between snares, kicks, toms and cymbals, rather than simply gating everything below a certain threshold. That means you can get quick, precise results, even on poorly recorded material. Furthermore, it employs frequency dependent decay and transparent leveling to tidy up performances, and features MIDI output for easy drum replacement or reinforcement.

The interface is split between three tabs – Detection, Decay and Leveller – to help guide your workflow. At the heart of the Oxford Drum Gate is intelligent drum hit Detection. First, the plugin detects them all with tailor-made transient detection. Then, you simply decide which ones to keep.

For example, in order to reduce spill on a snare track in a dynamic mix of backbeats, ghost notes, and cross stick hits, the Snare button (there are also buttons for Kick and Toms) is clicked and everything else is gated out.

The problem with gating drums with a traditional gate is often the abrupt and unmusical gating of toms, where you want to keep their natural ring while at the same time remove the spill around them. Drum Gate’s adaptive Decay section allows for the quick control each tom’s resonance in real-time and according to the velocity of each detected hit. A spectral decay editor also lets you fine tune the resonance, ring, or rattle of each drum hit while quickly clamping down on the spill.

Another problem is that many times there’s a need to improve the dynamic consistency of a performance. The Leveller section enables louder main hits and softer background articulations to be conformed to two separately controlled target level ranges.

Finally, if you want to replace or augment the drum sound with a sample, Drum Gate’s hit detection and MIDI triggering functionality lets you retain the dynamics of an original performance.

The Oxford Drum Gate will launch at an introductory retail price of $180, which lasts until December 4th. The price will then increase to its normal $245. It works with Mac or PC on any plugin format with sample rates up to 192kHz.

You can find out more here, or check out the video below for a quick example of how well it works.

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