Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2 - Decay

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Oxford Drum Gate 2

The noise gate that actually understands drums.

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Intelligent detection. Phase-locked alignment. Adaptive decay. Get clean, mix-ready drums from the first hit, without fighting your gate or losing the feel.

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£149.99
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The Noise Gate Built For Drums

The Noise Gate Built For Drums

Inconsistent hits, phase issues, and uncontrolled spill can make or break a drum mix before the rest of the production has even begun.

Not a threshold-based noise gate. Not source separation. A purpose-built drum detection engine.

Whether you're mixing live-tracked drums across close mics, overheads and rooms, or shaping kit sounds from stems, Drum Gate 2 gives you total command so these elements work for your mix rather than against it.

Drum Gate 2 In Action

Watch producer George Lever (Sleep Token, Loathe, Thornhill) build a drum mix from raw close mics using Drum Gate 2.
Watch Now

What's New In Drum Gate 2?

Drum Gate 1 Drum Gate 2
Detect every intended drum hit (with zero false triggers) without babysitting multiple controls. ✔︎ ✔︎
Align time, polarity, and phase across any set of drum tracks to give a clean, punchy starting point for downstream mixing decisions. ✔︎
Decay drum resonances naturally while attenuating spill (no fiddly filter-tweaking or whumpy source-separation artefacts). ✔︎ ✔︎
Level out dynamic inconsistencies without losing expressive playing dynamics. ✔︎ ✔︎
Clip each hit consistently so that drums cut through dense mixes evenly. ✔︎
Enhance pre-beat-detected drums with Drum Gate 2's Decay and Leveller (no re-detection needed). ✔︎
Export MIDI for detected hits for sample triggering. ✔︎ ✔︎

Explore Drum Gate 2

Source Selector

Choose which source you want to trigger Drum Gate 2 with.

Select between audio inputs, MIDI inputs, external (to access the sidechain), or just opt to align only.

Check out the video below to find out how and when to use each source.

Drum Type Selector

Choose which drum type you want to trigger Drum Gate 2 with.

Oxford Drum Gate 2 uses intelligent drum hit detection to identify kicks, snares, hi-hats and toms with precision, even in complex playing. Simply click to choose which drums to process and let the detection engine do the work.

Check out the video below:

Confidence Level Selector

Choose the confidence that Drum Gate 2 should be triggered by.

Increase the Sensitivity if some transients are not being marked. Decrease Sensitivity or increase Min ReTrigger Time if multiple markers appear on each transient.

Check out the video below to explore how and when to use each source.

Learn and Remove Hits

Choose the drum hits that aren't being detected.

You may not always be able to set the Threshold to remove unwanted transients without also losing some that you want to keep. Use Learn to rescue those lost beneath the Threshold. If unwanted transients are matched above the Threshold, use Remove to gate them and similar sounding transients. In a pinch, you can use the Transient Level to remove quiet transients, bypassing the drum type matching.

Check out the video below to explore how learn and remove specific drum hits.

MIDI Out

Export MIDI to trigger samples externally.

Oxford Drum Gate 2 lets you trigger samples with sample-accurate timing, removing the need for manual adjustment. Export isolated drum hits as MIDI directly to your DAW, perfectly aligned and retaining the original dynamics of the performance.

Check out the video below:

Drum Gate 2

Hear The Drum Gate 2 Difference

Loading audio files...

Full Kit:

Gated & Aligned

Active Bypass
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Loading audio files...

Toms:

Gated Toms

Active Bypass
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Key Features

Intelligent Drum Hit Detection

Isolate hits from bleed instantly, even in busy close-mics.

Intelligent Drum Hit Detection

Drum close mics are full of bleed, and traditional threshold gates can't tell the difference between real hits and unwanted spill. Ghost notes disappear, cross stick gets lost, and you end up fighting the gate instead of mixing.

Drum Gate 2 uses intelligent detection to identify kicks, snares, hi-hats and toms with precision, even in complex playing. Choose which drums to process and let the detection engine do the work.

The result? Clean, controlled tracks where every intentional hit stays intact and bleed is removed reliably.
Adaptive Decay

Keep the ring, lose the noise.

Adaptive Decay

Noise gates often cut too aggressively, choking a drum's natural ring and leaving hits sounding flat and lifeless. Fixed decay settings can't adapt to real performances. Soft hits get truncated, harder hits ring unnaturally, and spill still finds its way through when you loosen the gate.

Adaptive Decay adjusts the decay time based on each hit's velocity, so the gate responds musically rather than mechanically.

Drums keep their natural resonance. Unwanted noise is clamped down automatically, even in complex performances.
Leveller

Tighter dynamics, less automation.

Leveller

Inconsistent drum hits can make balancing a mix harder than it needs to be. Accents jump out, ghost notes disappear, and you end up relying on automation just to keep things under control.

Drum Gate's Level tab smooths out performance variations while preserving the contrast between louder hits and subtle ghost notes.

Tighter, more consistent drums that sit naturally in the mix, with less automation and more musical control.
Sample-Accurate Drum Triggering

No manual nudging. Samples land exactly where the hits do.

Sample-Accurate Drum Triggering

Triggering drum samples often means chasing timing issues. Small offsets add up, and manual nudging quickly becomes part of the workflow.

Drum Gate 2 exports isolated hits as MIDI with sample-accurate timing, perfectly aligned and retaining the original dynamics. Whether you're layering or replacing, the groove stays intact.
Time, Polarity & Phase Alignment

Fix phase issues in one click. Tighter low end, punchier shells.

Time, Polarity & Phase Alignment

Kick drums losing low-end weight. Snares thinning out. Transients smearing before the mix has even begun.

When drum tracks aren’t aligned in time and phase, you’re fighting the kit from the very first hit.

Drum Gate 2 precisely aligns your entire drum setup in both time and phase, locking the kit together so the foundation of your mix is solid from the start.
External Sidechain

Already detected your hits? Skip detection entirely.

External Sidechain

Once transients are already mapped, there’s no reason to detect them again.

Drum Gate 2 can be triggered via an external sidechain, following MIDI, trigger plugins, DAW markers or manual edits. Every instance opens at the exact same moment, keeping multi-mic kits locked in time and phase.

With timing handled upstream, Drum Gate 2 focuses purely on decay shaping and levelling, without disrupting your existing workflow.
Hit Clipper

Clipping built in. No extra plugins needed.

Hit Clipper

Traditional clippers react unevenly to changing drum dynamics. Loud hits get crushed while quieter hits slip through untouched.

Drum Gate 2’s Intelligent Leveller feeds the clipper the peak information, so each transient is clipped on its own terms.

Uniform power, density, and clarity, even in dense mixes.

What The Pros Think Of Drum Gate 2

  • David Bottrill

    David Bottrill

    (Tool, Mastadon, Muse)
    It appears on every mix I do. The detection algorithm is virtually flawless and I’m able to isolate individual drums to be able to have clear close mic sounds to mix with any level of compression while maintaining a good overhead balance.

  • Michael Brauer

    (The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, James Brown)
    The ability to isolate hi hats this precisely is groundbreaking. The control over High Frequency dampening and decay lets me contour the perfect gated hit. It keeps drums clean and natural sounding.
  • Ben Baptie

    Ben Baptie

    (Little Simz, Beabadoobee, Jordan Rakei, Michael Kiwanuka)
    What a plugin! It's fantastic. Very very intuitive and incredibly powerful if it needs to be. Really finding using it subtly is creating some wonderful results, especially just to bring out some more dynamic shifts within the drums when they (potentially) could've been recorded a little better!

  • Ross Hogarth

    (Van Halen, Def Leppard, The Black Crowes)
    Oxford Drum Gate has been a go-to because it gives me control without killing the musicality. Drum Gate 2 feels like a real step change. It’s quicker to dial in, more flexible, and sounds more musical than other gates. It’s genuinely refreshing. Less time editing, more time getting drums that feel big, punchy, and still natural.

FAQs

1. Insert Drum Gate 2 on your close mics.

2. Press play and watch hit markers appear automatically.

3. Confirm the drum type (kick/snare/tom/hats). Usually auto-detected from your track name.

4. If required, adjust the Confidence until the spill stops without losing wanted hits.

5. Set Decay so tails sound natural, not gated.

Stop when it sounds right, then align the full kit.

Once Drum Gate 2 is on all your drum tracks, open the Align tab on any instance and press Analyse. Time, polarity, and phase across every mic, sorted.

Traditional gates use a volume threshold, so if a sound is loud enough, it passes. This means loud hi-hat bleed on your top snare mic, or loud kick bleed on your bottom snare mic gets through, while quiet ghost notes get cut. Source-separation tools can isolate drums but often introduce artefacts, smeared transients and an unnatural processed quality. Oxford Drum Gate 2 takes a different approach: it detects and classifies each hit by drum type, then gives you musical control over gating, decay, dynamics and timing, without altering the character of the source audio.

Yes; this is exactly what Drum Gate 2 is designed for. Because classification is based on timbre rather than volume, you can separate quiet snare hits from loud kick spill on the same track.

Drum Gate 2 doesn't use fixed decay settings. Adaptive Decay adjusts in real time based on each hit's velocity, so softer hits ring naturally and harder hits are controlled proportionally. The source audio stays untouched; there's no resynthesis or stem separation artefacts.

Yes. Set overhead and room tracks to "Source: Alignment Only" and they won't be gated, but they'll be included in the phase/time alignment analysis. Press Analyse from any instance to align the full kit at once.

170–183ms depending on sample rate; required for accurate hit classification.

Your DAW's delay compensation handles this automatically, so there's no timing impact in your mix.

This makes Drum Gate 2 a mixing tool, not a tracking insert. For tracking, bypass it, then re-enable it afterwards.

Yes. Set Source to "External (side-chain)" for audio triggering, or "MIDI" for Note On triggering with selectable channel and note. This is useful when working with pre-existing trigger tracks or synchronising gating across multiple mic channels.

Whilst optimized for drums, you can experiment with other percussive sources like hand percussion or plucked instruments. The best results come from cleaning up and shaping multi mic drum recordings.

Yes. Drum Gate 2 has a fully functional 15-day free demo. Fully featured, no restrictions. Test it in your own sessions before purchasing.

Drum Gate 2 is compatible with all major DAWs that support VST3, AU, or AAX plugin formats. This includes Pro Tools, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Cubase, Nuendo, Studio One, Reaper, and others.

Each licence includes two simultaneous activations. Licences are managed through your iLok account and can be moved between machines as needed.

Compatibility

Specifications

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 Machine Install directly on your computer.
    • iLok Device Requires an iLok2 or iLok3 USB dongle (latest drivers required).
    • 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.

    All versions: Free iLok account and the iLok License Manager, plus an appropriate Sonnox product licence.

Supported Platforms

    Compatible plugin formats for common DAWs:

    • AAX Native Avid® Pro Tools® 11 or higher.
    • VST3 Supported VST3 hosts.
    • AudioUnit (AU) Supported AU hosts on macOS.

System Requirements

    Minimum and recommended specifications for reliable performance.

    Minimum System Requirements

    • macOS® macOS® 11.0 • Intel i5 6600 CPU • 8GB RAM
    • Windows® Microsoft® Windows® 10 22H2 (64-bit only) • Intel i5 6600 CPU or equivalent • 8GB RAM

    Recommended System Requirements

    • macOS® macOS® 12.0 or higher • Apple® M1 CPU or higher • More than 8GB RAM
    • Windows® Microsoft® Windows® 11 (64-bit only) • Intel i7 9700 CPU or higher/equivalent • More than 8GB RAM

    Disclaimer: Our products may work on older OS or host DAW versions, but they are untested.

Sample Rates & Latency

    Oxford Drum Gate 2 introduces latency due to its lookahead detection, ML classification, and spectral processing. This makes it primarily intended for mixing rather than live tracking.

    Your DAW’s automatic delay compensation will handle this latency across all tracks, so it won’t cause timing issues in your mix.

    For live monitoring or tracking sessions, bypass Oxford Drum Gate 2 during recording and enable it afterwards for mixing.

    Reported Latency

    Sample Rate (kHz)
    Latency (ms)
    44.1
    169.5
    48
    167
    88.2
    169.5
    96
    167
    176.4
    169.5
    192
    167
Learn more about Oxford Drum Gate 2

Experience Drum Gate 2 Today

Download demo Contact support Read user guide
Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2 - Decay
Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2 - Classify
Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2 - Detect
Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2 - Align
Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2 - Level

Description

The Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2 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.

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