Review: Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2

Mixing drum kits is a challenge that every engineer and producer faces. There are just so many parameters to consider — phase, alignment, level, bleed, and more. A perfectly recorded kit is definitely a unicorn in the audio world. We all seek that magical tool that can simplify our lives and make everything sound better instantly with a single click. Today, we explore a potential contender: the Oxford Drum Gate 2 from Sonnox.

At first glance, this appears to be a combination of different plugins — a phase alignment tool, a drum leveler, and a gate — all stuffed neatly into one package. The key question is whether the plugin’s whole is greater than the sum of its parts, or is this just another mythical-sounding tool that doesn’t quite deliver?

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

A Whole DAW for Your Drums

The user interface of Oxford Drum Gate 2 (hereafter, just “ODG2”, to save your eyes and my fingers considerable effort) looks really slick and sophisticated. However, it’s not a plugin that you can just open and immediately feel comfortable with. Because many of ODG2’s functions are “automatic”, it has a very dense interface, with many menus and oodles of options. 

There are four basic windows of operation built within the main ODG2 interface: Detect, Decay, Align, and Level. Let’s look at each in turn.

Detect – This is where you specify what to listen for. In many ways, it acts as a fancy threshold control for your gate. Instead of merely reacting to volume levels, the plugin uses machine learning algorithms to make smarter and material-dependent decisions. There are two menus within the Detect page: Detect, where every drum hit is detected; and Classify, where each hit is analysed to determine how closely it matches the selected drum type. 

Decay – This is the gate release control. It provides a wide range of options to control how the tails of each hit come through. 

Align – This is where all of the phase, polarity, and time alignment magic happens. Align is also the simplest of the four main menus to navigate. 

Level – This section includes all of the drum leveler controls. It provides dynamic control before the next stage of EQ and compression. The Level section also includes various options to shape how the hits are leveled, from the softest to the loudest. 

Apart from these four menus, ODG2 includes a set of global controls. These are basically a level meter, a bypass switch, and several controls for MIDI capture and detection.

Patience, Practice, and Perfection

As with every plugin I review, I downloaded the demo, threw a few instances of the plugin on some live drums and just dove right in. I quickly realised that I was feeling extremely lost and disoriented with this plugin. I’m sure those familiar with Oxford Drum Gate 1 might feel more at home, but as someone who hasn’t used it, there was a lot to figure out.

The basic usage of ODG2 is not especially intuitive or easy to figure out. I spent a lot of time trying to work out what it was doing, feeling like it was either doing too much or too little. I then watched some videos of people using the plugin. At the time of writing this review, there are no in-depth videos directly from Sonnox on how to use ODG2. I watched some third-party reviews and an intro video by Sonnox. It seemed clearer after that and I went back to my session.

But I quickly realised that I still didn’t quite understand what certain controls did. So, I finally caved and dug info the user manual. That was really helpful! The manual details the setup of ODG2, step by step. After spending some time with the manual and then working with the plugin side by side, I was able to build a solid understanding of how the plugin works and what each control does.

Once you understand it, you realise the true power of what this plugin offers. It’s almost like an all-in-one solution that handles all the initial drudgery of drum clean-up. The gate by itself is absolutely great. It has everything you would want from a gate, though it uses non-standard terms like “confidence” and “classify”, which can make it slightly annoying to figure out.

However, the way ODG2 is set up does make sense once you learn its ways. The way the plugin recognises kicks, snares, toms, and other drums is extremely impressive. I tested on a range of sources of various qualities, and it worked almost every time. Having a separate decay control really provides fine control over how the decay of one hit spills into the next, thereby helping you achieve a ‘looser’ or ‘tighter’ gate feeling very intuitively. 

The Align feature is an easy one-button control; just hit Analyse and let it do its thing. In a few short seconds, your drums are perfectly aligned. The only issue is that this particular feature of ODG2 can be quite inconsistent in its results. I would suggest multiple passes and trying with different regions of the track to see what produces the best results. Overall, I think Auto Align by Sound Radix still may do a better job at phase alignment.

The Leveler helps you pull extra details and control the overall dynamics of your kit. It functions less like compression and more like automation. ODG2’s Leveler can be a bit tricky to set up manually, but the auto-leveler does a good job most of the time. I do love the clipper – it never gets too heavy-handed, even at maximum settings, and adds subtle heft to hits.

A great feature here that doesn’t get enough attention is the ability to export as MIDI to setup triggers. In fact, ODG2 includes several MIDI-based features. You can also control the gates via MIDI, but the ability to send each of your kicks, snares, and toms out as MIDI on different channels is particularly helpful. 

Another point worth mentioning is that the manual is very well written. Sonnox have provided a set of troubleshooting-style instructions for nearly every scenario. They have anticipated most of the common frustrations a user might encounter and addressed them all in one place.

Oxford Drum Gate 2 is truly amazing and is definitely a tool that I will leverage frequently in my future mixes. However, it can be quite tricky to tweak and work with. Still, Sonnox say that in most cases, once you set it up correctly, you won’t need to tweak it too much.

While that’s largely true, I feel that because ODG2 does set up in a very particular way and affects so many aspects of the audio, it’s easy to wind up with a drum “sound” that’s fairly similar every time. This has a lot to do with how the gate handles decay across lows, mids, and highs — especially on audio like snares and hats. So, you need to learn to tweak the right settings if you’re aiming for unique sound profiles across different projects. In the end, you need to thoroughly read the manual and spend lots of time with it to truly harness this plugin’s full potential.

Buy Oxford Drum Gate 2 from our partners at Plugin Boutique.

Learn more about Oxford Drum Gate 2 at the Sonnox website.