This Shouldn’t Work: Oxford Drum Gate 2 Extracts Drums from a Phone Recording
There is now a way to take a phone recording of drums and turn it into something genuinely usable. Not through stem separation, but through a different approach to how drum detection works.
In a recent demo, Mike Malyan put Oxford Drum Gate 2 to the test in a way it was not designed for. Instead of feeding it clean, close-mic recordings, he gave it the exact opposite. A single camera phone recording of a full kit, complete with distance, bleed and room noise.
Check out the results below:
Starting at the extreme
Oxford Drum Gate 2 is built with multi-mic workflows in mind. Close sources, controlled environments, and precise gating across individual drum channels.
So pushing it with a single, distant phone recording is about as far from that use case as it gets.
On its own, the recording sounds exactly as you would expect. Everything blended together, no separation between kick, snare or cymbals, and very little control over the balance.
Not level-based gating
What makes Drum Gate 2 behave differently here is how it detects hits.
Rather than opening and closing based on level, it analyses the transient characteristics of the signal. It is listening for the identity of each drum, not just how loud something is.
From that single recording, it is able to generate separate drum stems. Kick and snare events begin to emerge from what was originally just a wash of sound.
From a technical perspective, it is a significant step. From a mix perspective, it is only part of the story.
Where it becomes useful
The turning point comes with MIDI.
Drum Gate 2 can output MIDI based on the detected hits. That means those extracted transients can be used to trigger a drum sampler.
In Mike’s test, this is where things move from interesting to genuinely useful. The performance captured on a phone becomes a clean, controllable drum track, driven by high-quality samples while retaining the original feel.
Real-world material
The same approach holds up beyond simple examples.
Even in recordings with heavy bleed and distance (the fantastic Baard Kolstad drumming for Leprous, in this case), Drum Gate 2 is able to distinguish between elements like kick and snare. In the demo, this extends to full live recordings, where separation would normally be difficult to achieve.
What this opens up is a practical use for recordings that would otherwise be discarded.
Rehearsals, live clips, quick phone captures are now open to the possibility of being usable rather than having to be discarded.
Explore it yourself
Are you ready to push Oxford Drum Gate 2 to its limits?
Start your free 15 day trial and explore using it on single mic recordings, phone camera recordings and rehearsals.