Drum Gate's interface has three sub pages or tabs to program detection, decay timing and leveling. The Detection tab has a real-time graphical view of the incoming signals parading left-to-right with detected transients.

There is a fader to adjust threshold like any other gate and I liked having a graphical representation of what signal transients when they are above or below threshold. You can refine and specify more exactly this process by selecting the type of drum--Kick, Snare or Tom you're interested in and Drum Gate will allow only that particular drum through even if another sound at a higher threshold level is present!

Setting up Drum Gate is complete after you use Learn Unmatched for specific transients that don't matched the expected drum you have selected--such as a side snare drum hit that doesn't sound like the main snare drum. Simply loop a section in your DAW where Drum Gate will learn this other transient. By the same token, you may Remove Matched for falsely interpreted transients.

The Decay timing section is for adaptively setting the release time--the exact way and time period in which the gate closes down. You adjust how long the gate takes to shut down with the main Decay fader. Furthermore, you may "tune" the Resonant Decay period using the center node of an adjustable band pass filter (high and low pass filters) that the GUI shows superimposed over the spectral display of the transient's frequency content.

You can change how the frequencies of the drum are affected during the decay period. Bigger tom-toms are lower in frequency and you may want to have the cymbal bleed decay quickly but allow the sustaining tone of the drum to last longer with more decay time.

Also on this page are the Gain reduction fader or the Depth of the gate action; a cool feature that allows you to make softer hits decay faster than louder full level drum hits. This is another brilliant feature of Drum Gate.

The third page/section is called Leveller which can fix the level of all drum hits transparently; it is not a compressor but a way to program separately the level of both the soft and hard hits. You may keep realistic and natural dynamics yet increase the consistency of the relative levels of the soft hits and loud hits separately. After you're happy with setting up Drum Gate, the Leveller will alter the sound of the drum hits radically if you like. I found the way this works just amazing!

Checking Drum Gate Out!

My first job was on a poorly recorded kick drum track I wanted to heavily compress but had trouble with the compressor bringing up top kit spill (cymbals and toms) as well as other instruments in this live tracking recording session. I inserted Drum Gate before the compressor.

I always start with Drum Gate's Leveller in bypass. I used a very tight spectral filter 30-Hz to 140-Hz pass band on the Decay page. I set Open Threshold to -28dB, Sensitivity at 78% and the side-chain filter at a fairly high 118Hz for a kick drum gate. I used the Kick drum algorithm in Match Transients and I was basically done. I could get every ghost and lightly played bass drum to fire through the gate without fail!

In the Leveller section, I used Auto-Set Leveller and, in a few seconds of playing the bass drum track, it got the difference between the loud hits and softer hits closer together without sounding compressed. I checked the song in the verses where the dynamic range of the drums is greatest.

On the same song I found the cross-stick too soft compared to the louder snare hits---they were on the same track. In the past, I would have spent a lot of time chopping the snare track into two tracks: full snare and cross-stick, crossfade between them and then gate and EQ them separately. Whew!

With Drum Gate I was able to just average out the volume differences between the two drums using the Leveller section.

Drum Gate also generates MIDI notes from a gated drum track. It is awesome to trigger a new drum sample in exact sync with your real drums. Unlike some other DAWs, Pro Tools does not support simultaneous MIDI output from an audio track. But after designating which MIDI note was required for AIR's Boom drum machine plug-in, I use the Capture button and played the song down. Drum Gate recorded and stored the MIDI data that I later "dragged" directly from the plug-in to a MIDI or Instrument track in Pro Tools. This works remarkably well I found.

Where the real drummer played cross-stick, I would just mute the full snare sample. It was no biggie and I also liked that Drum Gate tracks dynamically and triggers quieter samples when required.

Drum Gate is an awesome new Sonnox tool that I'm getting better at using everyday. It has already saved me time doing some of the tedium and non-creative parts of mixing music. The Oxford Drum Gate sells for $217 MSRP.