Sonnox releases followup to its flagship Oxford Drum Gate plugin

Six years on, Sonnox has released a fresh version of its Oxford Drum Gate plugin. The Oxford Drum Gate 2 update comes as a huge step up, improving on sound quality, workflow and adding a slew of features to provide a “comprehensive” toolkit to clean up your drum recordings.

Back in 2020, MusicTech awarded Sonnox’s original drum tidying plugin top marks at 10/10. To build on the previous release, the company has added new time, polarity and phase alignment features, as well as an improved classification model to detect your kicks, snares, toms and hi hats with accuracy.

The alignment improvements should make tidying up multi-track drum recordings a piece of cake. Rather than having to suffer through phase coherence issues that come with tracking on multiple mics, Oxford Drum Gate 2’s new Align tab has an “intelligent algorithm” to refine your tone, punch and regain clarity. And Sonnox has made every effort to minimise timing artifacts, a pesky downside of other alignment tools.

Elsewhere, the new Adaptive Resonant Decay algorithm also lends from Sonnox’s Claro EQ plugin, adopting its resonance detection in order to detect and separate resonant decay from your drums. The algorithm is able to separate the initial drum hit form the corresponding spill, while still maintaining transients.

Users can also tweak their parameters of Gain Reduction, Decay, High-Frequency Damping and High and Low cutoffs.

Sonnox has also added an external sidechain input, making Oxford Drum Gate 2 more versatile than its predecessor. There are three input modes to allow flexibility, with Internal input, the External sidechain, and MIDI triggering.

Elsewhere, there’s also the new Hit Clip leveller clipper, another effort to maintain punch and clarity within your drum track. Hit Clip consults a hit’s post-leveller peak level and calculates the ceiling for each hit following hit. The tool also provides separate controls for Soft Hits and Loud Hits, to aid with your transient shaping.

To make the UI experience clear and intuitive, Oxford Drum Gate 2 also automatically groups tracks by name, as well as providing visual feedback. The plugin also offers stereo linking for overheads and room mics.

Of course, if you do miss the previous Oxford Drum Gate instalment, you can flick on Standard mode. The option to hop back to the original version allows a sense of familiarity, allowing you to pick and choose between the newer features and the tried-and-true original Oxford Drum Gate experience.

Existing Oxford Drum Gate owners can upgrade for £41.66, while customers who purchased Oxford Drum Gate on or after 1st September 2025 will receive Oxford Drum Gate 2 as a complimentary upgrade.

Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate 2 supports both Windows and macOS in VST3, Audio Unit, and AAX plug-in formats.

Oxford Drum Gate 2 is available now at an introductory price of £99.99 until 31 March (normal price £149.99). For more info, head to Sonnox.