Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate – intelligent drum separation
Posted on: Friday 11th of October 2019
Sonnox’s new Oxford Drum Gate is an intelligent gate which understands the difference between a kick drum, a snare and a tom. Instead of just ‘hearing’, it actively listens and so can create results which wouldn’t be possible with a conventional, level based process. At the heart of the plug-in is intelligent drum-hit Detection. First, all hits are analysed in real-time using tailor-made transient detection. Then, you decide which hits on which drums to keep. For example, do you need to reduce spill on a snare track in a dynamic mix of backbeats, ghost notes, and cross stick hits? Click the Snare button. Everything else is gated out.
For toms, use Drum Gate’s adaptive Decay section to quickly tune the resonance of each tom, in real-time, according to the velocity of each detected hit. There’s a level aspect as – conform louder main hits and softer background articulations to two separately controlled target level ranges in the Leveller section.
Drum Gate’s hit detection and MIDI triggering functionality can be used to augment/replace individual drums with samples and confidently retain the dynamics from the original performance. After ‘learning’ the audio, a small icon appears bottom right of the interface – this is a a MIDI file which can be dragged from the plug-in window to a new track.
The Oxford Drum Gate will launch at an introductory retail price of £127.50/$183.00, $172.00 MAP. This 25% saving will last until midnight GMT Wednesday 4th December 2019. After which it’ll revert to its full retail price of £170.00/$244.80, $230.00 MAP.
