Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2

The Detect page will look familiar to existing users of Drum Gate — but its Classify view now gives an assessment of the algorithm’s confidence that it has correctly identified each hit.

Already much more than a simple gate, the Oxford Drum Gate is back — with significant enhancements!

When Sonnox first released Oxford Drum Gate, I wasn’t initially inspired by the idea of another noise gate, but it soon became clear that this was something different. By identifying different drum hits, regardless of their level, it solved a problem I encountered on almost every mix session simply and efficiently. Oxford Drum Gate 2 builds on that original version, adding a number of useful features that broaden what can be achieved and can make it much more useful in complex sessions. Happily, though, Sonnox haven’t sacrificed the clarity and efficiency that made it so effective. Neil Rogers reviewed version 1 in SOS March 2020, and covered the core concepts very well, so in this review I’ll focus mostly on the new features.

In Alignment

The new Align page works across multiple instances, bringing all the sources together into a single pane. In most cases, the plug‑in uses the DAW’s track names to group related channels and determine the detection type automatically. After a short audio capture, the polarity, timing (delay) and phase rotation can be optimised for all tracks simultaneously. You might think an ARA plug‑in would have been best suited to alignment tasks, but it’s arguably less appropriate for gating and levelling, so Sonnox opted for real‑time processing. An alignment‑only mode is provided, though, for situations where phase optimisation is desirable but gating generally isn’t (for example, on ride cymbal tracks).

Once the capture has been performed, the results are displayed in a list view and can be auditioned directly. Optimising the phase relationship between mics will often deliver a tighter, more focused sound. Still, it isn’t unusual to find that the original recording feels more natural, so being able to check the result quickly is important. One detail that I particularly like, therefore, is the momentary bypass switch; this makes it incredibly quick and easy to compare the aligned and unaligned versions. You can also try running the alignment process more than once — it can produce slightly different results each time, since there are usually multiple possible solutions and several different settings may give equally good correlation.

Drum Gate 2 introduces the ability to automatically optimise polarity, delay and phase rotation of multiple drum mic channels.

The...