
This not only makes ODG particularly sensitive to the transients created by drum hits, but allows it to tell the difference between kick, snare and tom hits as well.įor example, a snare hit may create a blip on the snare meter and a smaller blip on the tom meter setting the Match Transient threshold so that only the snare’s blip exceeds it ensures ODG will see that transient as a snare and not a tom. Typically, a gate processor decides whether or not to open based entirely upon the measured signal level, but Oxford Drum Gate (or ODG as I’ll call it) is all about drums, and so adds to this basic recipe some rather clever detection capabilities. Aiming to make this laborious task easier, then, is Sonnox’s new Oxford Drum Gate, a plug-in dynamics processor for VST2, VST3, AU and AAX Native hosts. This sort of gating can be agonisingly fiddly to set up, and often involves all sorts of additional audio editing and/or automation in order to get an accurate result.

This generally involves using gates on the individual drum tracks so that only the intended drum is heard via a track’s channel, and so that any EQ and other effects applied to the channel only impact the intended drum. However, no matter how careful you are with your close mic positioning, there will always be significant spill between the individual drum mics, which is where the next challenge comes in, namely mixing all of those mic signals. In any event, such approaches limit flexibility at mixdown time, hence why we normally surround the kit with microphones, capturing individual drums up-close along with various stereo pairs that capture the entire kit. There are techniques for using just two or three mics, but these rely on excellent live-room acoustics and spending an awful lot of time honing the position of those mics prior to recording.

SONNOX OXFORD HOW TO
The most fundamental part of the challenge lies in how to mic-up such a large and complex – not to mention loud – sound source.
