This can be particularly useful when you have a snare track that includes a lot of quiet incidental ghost notes in amongst the louder strikes, and where those ghost notes are at times quieter than the spill from other drums. Overlaying these meters is another moveable threshold marker that is used to define the meter level that has to be exceeded in order for ODG to consider the transient to be of a given drum type.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. Here a row of three buttons allow you to tell ODG which types of drum to detect (or ignore), and above each button is a corresponding level meter that indicates how likely it is that the currently sounding transient is of a particular type. The intelligent drum detection can be tweaked in a few different ways, primarily via the Match Transients controls positioned to the right of the waveform readout. All detected transients are marked on the waveform, whilst those areas of the waveform that trigger the gate to open are shaded blue. The plug-in window’s Detection view, where most time is spent, is dominated by a realtime rectified waveform readout overlaid by a line indicating the current gate threshold. 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. 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 plugins review 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.
Recording and mixing an acoustic kit is, however, one of those sound engineering challenges that really separates the pros from the tinkerers. Much as I love building up rhythms and beats using a good drum sampler and pad controller, there’s nothing quite like the sound of a well-played live drum kit for groove, energy and spontaneity. Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate is an intelligent and adaptable gate processor that’s as easy to use as it is powerful, and that can save hours of painstaking gate setup work.
#Sonnox oxford plugins review software
Software is getting cleverer, we all know that, but Sonnox’s latest plug-in takes on the nuanced detail of drum gating setup with such aplomb that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was self-aware.