The Experts team wondered what we thought people would want to find behind the windows of a dream studio advent calendar. Some of the things we own, some we wish we did. Owned or not, we think any of the things we name in the next 7 days would be a gift to a professional studio owner.
Day 18 - Oxford Drum Gate
There’s a common phrase used in our industry. So many products are released every year, each offering something new or even (winces) ‘game changing’ that something is a `”solution looking for a problem”.
If you watch a PureMix series with a big name mixer you’ll probably find they are using a relatively small selection of tools. Utility EQ and dynamics plugins, maybe a Pultec or 1176 in hardware or software, some nice reverb. Other than tuning plugins what you’re probably not going to see most of the time is a plugin which does something you couldn’t do using the traditional tools which have existed for decades. I’m not saying transient designers or dynamic equalisers, or more exotic tools aren’t useful. Just that they are only useful occasionally. If the material is well captured you’re probably not going to need them often, and that’s a good thing.
So it was a surprise to me when in 2019 Sonnox released the Oxford Drum Gate. My initial response was unenthusiastic. “A gate? Really’…”. I couldn’t see much to be excited about. However when I got a demo I was blown away because the Oxford Drumgate solves a problem which exists in almost every session simply, efficiently and crucially - better!
What Is There To Get Excited About A Gate?
Conventional gates use the instantaneous input level of the signal to control the output level, letting audio above a selected threshold pass or reducing the level of audio below that threshold. Various refinements exist including using the ratio control to turn a gate into an expander, attack and release to shape the envelope of the sound, Hold and Hysteresis to counter some of the undesirable artefacts gates can produce, and of course side chain filters and use of key inputs to allow the user to focus on the wanted audio and differentiate that from the unwanted spill. The problem is that conventional gates are stupid. They respond to the loudest signal regardless of whether is it the drum you’re after, or another drum you’re not.
Gates might be stupid but (most) operators aren’t. So many people use the editing capabilities of their DAW to manually isolate the sounds they want. Semi automated solutions such as Pro Tools’ Strip Silence can speed this up a great deal but gates tease us with their 95% success rate. The problem is that most of the time a properly set up gate works well. But you end up with an handful of hits which just don’t play nice. If the gate could just understand that that hit is a rim shot, not a rack tom…
This is where Oxford Drum Gate comes in. It does understand the difference between a kick drum and a snare and a tom. 90% of the time you just select the drum you want and it works first time. You can teach it to recognise awkward hits if you are getting false triggers, it can generate MIDI triggers with equal aplomb and even has a leveller built in which can even out performances without introducing compression artefacts.
Oxford Drum Gate does something I actually need and does it better than the alternatives. It’s a solution which isn’t looking for a problem and this is why it’s behind this particular window of our Expert’s Advent Calendar.