Oxford Drum Gate

DRUM NOISE GATE PLUGIN

Take your drum sounds to the next level, giving them punch, power and clarity with our intelligent, intuitive noise gate plugin.

A Noise Gate Designed Specifically for Drums

Most mix engineers have lost faith in the ability of a noise gate to clean up drums accurately, leading to drum tracks being replaced entirely by samples or remaining filled with bleed, resulting in a loss in clarity and punch.

Whether it’s noise gate chatter, misdetection, choked resonance or lost ghost notes, attempting to process a drum kit with your typical noise gate often leads to a worse result than you started with.

Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate solves all these problems in one intuitive plugin.

With its range of intelligent drum processing tools, Drum Gate will quickly become your ultimate companion for mixing controlled, impactful drums.

For drums that smash through the mix with unparalleled clarity and definition, choose Oxford Drum Gate.

drum gate plugin gui

Intelligent Drum Hit Detection

The days of using thresholds alone to ineffectively gate drums are over.

Oxford Drum Gate can reliably identify and isolate different drum types from the rest of the kit, even with different hits at different levels.

Choose whether to separate your snares, kicks and toms with the click of a button.

Need to reduce spill on a snare track in a dynamic mix of backbeats, ghost notes, and cross-stick hits? No problem! Just click the Snare button.


Adaptive Drum Decay

Allowing the natural ring of a drum through a noise gate whilst stopping the spill is a far-fetched reality in conventional noise gates, resulting in abrupt, choked and un-musical gating.

Drum Gate's adaptive Decay section quickly focuses on the resonance of each drum in real time, tailoring the length of each hit according to its velocity.

You’ll be able to remove spill whilst keeping the resonances that bring your drums to life, keeping your kit as lively as desired.


Drum Leveller

Consistency is crucial in making your kit the driving force behind your mix.

There are times you’ll wish the drummer’s performance could have been improved, and through the Leveller, getting a consistent level throughout will be made a breeze.

Consistency shouldn’t mean a lack of dynamics, so with Oxford Drum Gate, you can conform louder main hits and softer background articulations to two separately controlled target levels.


Drum MIDI Replacement

You can augment or replace individual drums with samples by simply dragging a MIDI file directly to your DAW from Oxford Drum Gate.

In addition to the perfectly aligned hits, you’ll retain all of the dynamics from the original performance

  • Precise transient detection and intelligent drum-type matching to effortlessly separate the hits you want to keep from the spill you don't.
  • Create custom drum profiles to isolate unusual drum types or fix the occasional kick, snare, or tom mismatch.
  • Decay curve which adapts to the velocity of each drum hit, giving you consistent spill reduction on dynamic performances.
  • Spectral decay editor lets you preserve the resonance, ring, or rattle of each drum hit while quickly clamping down on the spill.
  • The leveller's dual target and amount controls let you improve level consistency without losing the contrast between loud hits and soft ghost notes.
  • Real-time MIDI output and MIDI file capture, for accurately triggering drum samples.
USER COMMENTS

"It’s already blowing my mind. They are calling this a drum gate but it’s a magic box of tricks and a drum mixing dream come true!"

Greg Wells (The Greatest Showman, Adele, John Legend, Keith Urban, Deftones)

"Separating a kick/snare out of a loop, if even possible, was always a total pain in the a*s. I have no idea how Sonnox did it but they figured it out!! What a time saver. You’ve made my assistants so happy!"

Michael Brauer (John Mayer, Coldplay, Bon Jovi, George Ezra)

"This is a great one-stop-shop of a plugin. Drum gate achieves what I’ve been trying to do with 3 separate plug-ins and more"

Andy Sneap (Killswitch Engage, Megadeth, Bullet for my Valentine, Opeth)

"Best rack and floor sound I've got in a long time, thanks to the decay settings"

Alex Archer, Vevo live producer (Sigrid, Kasabian, Kaiser Chiefs)

"Never isolated bass drum and snare drum so easily with such accuracy. Even subtle ghost notes in a very dynamic jazz performance!"

Nils Hahmann, Audio Engineer and Abbey Road Institute lecturer

"Drum Gate is just smarter than anything else designed to detect drum hits. Dynamics handling is out of this world!"

Dax Liniere, producer/mixer at Puzzle Factory Sound Studios

"This plugin is amazing black magic sh*t! I can't believe what I just did to fix a crappy drum track"

Will Russell, Grammy award-winning engineer/producer
AUDIO EXAMPLES

COMPATIBILITY
aax native
audio unit
vst 3
mac os
windows
ilok cloud
ilok usb
SPECIFICATIONS
 
  This plug-in offers 2 activations for each product licence you own.
  All licences must be kept on the same iLok account, and each activation will allow you to authorise your Plug-In using either of the following methods:
   
  • iLok USB device. iLok2 / iLok3 required with latest drivers

  • iLok Cloud. Active internet connection required
 

For more information about these choices please click here.

   

 

 

AAX
  • Pro Tools 11 and above – AAX Native 
  • Approved Pro Tools CPU, OS and hardware configuration: www.avid.com
  • For legacy versions, please contact support
  • iLok2, iLok3 or an iLok account with an active internet connection is required.
 
Audio Units
  • Mac OS X 10.12 or later (Intel or Apple Silicon)
  • iLok2, iLok3 or an iLok account with an active internet connection is required.
 
VST3
  • Mac OS X 10.12 or later (Intel or Apple Silicon)
  • Windows 7 or later
  • iLok2, iLok3 or an iLok account with an active internet connection is required.

 

 

Please see the following support article on general DAW compatibility - General DAW Compatibility

 

The Drum Gate does not support Avid’s TDM/HDX hardware DSP platform (including Venue, S3L and S6L systems), Waves SoundGrid or Universal Audio's UAD platform.

NATIVE
Sample Rate (kHz) Latency (Samples) Latency (ms)
44.1 2289 65.5
48 3144 65.5
88.2 5777 65.5
96 6288 65.5
176.4 11554 65.5
192 12576 65.5
NATIVE
44.1 – 48 kHz:
88.2 – 96 kHz:
176.4 – 192 kHz: