Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2 Native

What Oxford Drum Gate (Nat) Is For

Oxford Drum Gate (Nat) is a drum gating plugin designed to speed up drum track cleanup during mixing and production. It is aimed at sound engineers, producers, and home studio users who want to reduce spill (cymbals in the snare, hi-hat in the toms, etc.) without sacrificing the drummer's performance: backbeats, cross stick, rolls, and especially ghost notes.
Rather than relying on a classic often unstable threshold, Oxford Drum Gate is based on a hit-centered logic: the plugin detects hits, then you simply choose which ones to keep. The result: a faster, more reliable workflow and a more natural sound, ideal for modern mixes (rock, metal, pop, funk, hip-hop, live) as well as more organic productions where you want to preserve attack and sustain.

Main Features

1) Detection: Tailored Detection for Drums

The core of Oxford Drum Gate is transient detection and intelligent matching to drum type. The goal is simple: find "all" hits, even in dynamic takes, then let you efficiently sort them. A typical example: a snare track alternating backbeats, ghost notes, and cross stick. Where a traditional gate might hesitate (poor detection, false triggers, muffled notes), Oxford Drum Gate aims for a clearer separation between useful information and spill.
For special cases (unusual drums, extreme tunings, uncommon takes), you can create custom drum profiles to isolate less standard instruments or temporarily correct confusion between kick, snare, or tom.

2) Decay: A Gate That Follows the Music

The decay processing is designed to avoid harsh and "unmusical" closures. Oxford Drum Gate offers Adaptive Decay: the release curve adjusts based on the velocity of each detected hit. In practice, this helps maintain consistent sustain on toms played loud/soft while reducing spill around softer hits.
This behavior is especially useful on expressive drum performances: you keep the feel of the playing (attack + body) and gain clarity in the mix without turning the take into an artificial sequence.

3) Spectral Decay Editor: Preserve Resonance, Control Spill

Drums are more than just attack: there is resonance (ring), the "rattle" of the timbre, and sometimes harmonics you want to keep. The Spectral Decay Editor allows sculpting the decay more selectively to maintain the natural character of the drum while quickly clamping unwanted elements.
This approach is very effective when you seek a transparent result: toms that sound big and open, snare that breathes, all while controlling cymbal invasion and stage noise.

4) Trigger / Leveller: Regularize Without Crushing Nuances

Oxford Drum Gate includes a leveling section to improve level consistency. The benefit is to bring main hits and background articulations closer to separate target ranges, with target and intensity controls. You can thus gain stability in the mix (more consistent backbeats, clearer tom fills) without losing contrast between accents and ghost notes.
This type of control is valuable when the drums need to stay upfront or when preparing a session for further processing (parallel compression, saturation, clipper) that reacts strongly to level variations.

5) MIDI: Reinforcement and Sound Replacement with Confidence

For sound design and production, Oxford Drum Gate offers real-time MIDI output as well as MIDI file capture. You can trigger samples (augmentation or replacement) while preserving the original performance dynamics, facilitating clean layering: stronger kick, more consistent snare, more impactful toms, all while keeping the human feel.
This feature naturally integrates into a modern DAW workflow: track cleanup, level consistency, then triggering sound libraries if needed, based on detection logic designed for drums.

Technical specifications