Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate

Oxford Drum Gate

Effortlessly isolate your kicks, snares, and toms with intelligent hit recognition.

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Isolate your kicks, snares and toms in seconds with real-time, intelligent hit detection. For tight control or effortless editing, Drum Gate delivers every time.

£199.99
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The Noise Gate Built for Drums

Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate
Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate
Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate
Oxford Drum Gate
Traditional noise gates often fall short when it comes to drums. Misfired gates, choked hits, lost ghost notes, and excess spill leave your drums flat and lifeless—or worse, force you to replace them with samples.

Oxford Drum Gate changes the game. It intelligently isolates drum hits, reduces spill, and preserves the natural resonance of your kit—no more misdetections or unnatural gating—just clean, tight, and powerful drum sounds.

Whether you’re controlling bleed on a live kit or refining drum loops, Drum Gate delivers authentic, natural, and precise results every time.

See What's Possible With Drum Gate

Oxford Drum Gate walkthrough with Mike Exeter

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Key Features

Intelligent Drum Hit Detection

Intelligent Drum Hit Detection

Say goodbye to ineffective threshold-based gating.

Oxford Drum Gate uses intelligent hit detection to isolate kicks, snares, and toms—even in complex performances. Click to select which drums you want to process, and let the plugin do the rest.

Want to keep delicate ghost notes or cross-stick hits on a snare track while eliminating spill? Drum Gate handles it with accuracy and ease.
Adaptive Drum Decay for Natural Resonance

Adaptive Drum Decay for Natural Resonance

Traditional gates often choke off a drum’s natural ring, leaving hits sounding flat.

Drum Gate solves this with its Adaptive Decay feature, which adjusts the decay dynamically based on each drum hit’s velocity.

This allows your drums to maintain their natural resonance while the gate clamps down on unwanted spill — tight control without sacrificing tone.
Drum Leveller for Consistent Hits

Drum Leveller for Consistent Hits

Inconsistent drum hits can make balancing your mix tricky.

The Drum Leveller gives you precise control over the dynamics, smoothing out performance variations without killing the contrast between loud hits and softer ghost notes.

Maintain natural dynamics while evening out your drummer’s performance for a tighter, cleaner sound.
Fast & Accurate MIDI Drum Replacement

Fast & Accurate MIDI Drum Replacement

Need to replace or augment drums in the mix?

Drum Gate makes it easy—export the isolated drum hits as MIDI directly to your DAW, perfectly aligned and with all the original dynamics intact.

Whether you’re augmenting or replacing, Drum Gate gives you complete flexibility without compromising the feel of the performance.

Description

The Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate redefines precision gating for drum and percussive tracks, solving the common challenges of bleed and mis-triggering that often plague drum mixes. Using intelligent drum-hit detection, this advanced gate plugin accurately isolates and controls each drum, ensuring clarity and impact without losing the natural feel of your performance. With its adaptive decay feature, you can tailor the gate’s release to match the resonance of each drum, capturing the full sustain without unwanted noise.

Optimized for studio professionals and mixing engineers, Oxford Drum Gate’s detailed frequency control allows you to refine individual elements in a drum kit, from tight kicks to shimmering cymbals. It integrates seamlessly with leading DAWs, enhancing workflow with efficient, high-performance processing. Designed with Sonnox’s DSP technology, the plugin delivers pristine sound quality while minimizing CPU usage, making it a versatile addition to any producer’s toolkit. Perfect for music production, mixing, and post-production, this gate is essential for achieving a polished, professional drum sound.

Watch Drum Gate In Action

Explore how engineers are saving hours on their drum mixes.

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What The Pros Think Of Drum Gate

  • "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

  • "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)

What our customers say 13 Reviews

  • 5
    Drum gate

    Posted by brian katz on 9th Jul 2025

    It’s one of those “do I really need this” plug-ins…” and then you use it on a track. Holy cow! I haven’t even looked at the manual. It’s so easy to use and yields results I couldn’t achieve fiddling with a traditional gate for 10x the effort. I especially love the ability to tune the decay, really a huge benefit.

  • 5
    Oxford gate

    Posted by Mats persson on 7th Jul 2025

    Fantastic

  • 5
    I'ts more than a Drum Gate

    Posted by Johnny Hagopian on 3rd Jul 2025

    I use it to Shape the leak drums character.

  • 5
    Oxford Drum Gate

    Posted by Mark King on 3rd Jul 2025

    The drum gate works very well. I bought it to go with my black salt drum gate as it has more options. I’m finding that I’m using the Oxford drum gate just about all the time as it allows me to fine tailor how it works with great results.

  • 5
    Oxford drum Gate

    Posted by Col on 3rd Jul 2025

    I'm using the Drum Gate on my band's live recordings, it's such a powerful for cleaning up all the bleed not only from the cymbals etc but also from the rest of the band, it's really helping me to clean things up, excellent!

  • 5
    I’m done.

    Posted by Andy on 1st Jul 2025

    No more searching for the holy grail….im settling on Sonnox. It just works and allows me to concentrate on finishing projects to the high standard that I have been seeking all these years.

  • 5
    Oxford Drum Gate

    Posted by Christian on 26th Jun 2025

    At last a Drumgate it works perfect, love it !

  • 4
    Drum Gate

    Posted by Stewart on 30th Apr 2025

    Seems to work seamlessly and very accurate.

  • 5
    Sonnox Drum Gate --creative time saver

    Posted by Patrick Pagano on 28th Apr 2025

    This tool works so well that i immediately save 45 minutes to an hour gating my live drums. It's a simple elegant threshold gate but is laid out simply and it works incredibly well and fast. No guessing and "gated drum" sounds after using this tool. First modern plugin I've found that work this reliably and this fast

Compatibility

Licencing

    Each Oxford plugin license includes two simultaneous activations.

    With an iLok account, you can authorise each activation on one of the following devices:

  • Local MachineInstall directly on your computer.
  • iLok DeviceRequires an iLok2 or iLok3 USB dongle (latest drivers required).
  • iLok CloudActivation via iLok Cloud requires an active internet connection (only one activation can be assigned to iLok Cloud; the other must be on a Local Machine or iLok Device).

Supported Formats

    Compatible plugin formats for various digital audio workstations (DAWs):

  • Audio Unit (AU)
  • VST3
  • AAX-NativePro Tools 11 or later.

Supported Operating Systems

    Our plugins are compatible with the following operating systems:

  • macOSmacOS 10.13 High Sierra or later.
  • WindowsWindows 10 (64-bit) or later.

    • For compatibility with older systems, please contact our support team.

Documentation

Try Oxford Drum Gate today

Try Oxford Drum Gate today

Try a free demo
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