In this free video tutorial, Julian takes a drum recording and steps back from all the options presented by the 15 microphones used during tracking and uses some Sonnox plug-ins to help get more from fewer tracks. Using the amazing Oxford Drum Gate and a little EQ and compression he shows just how easy it can be.

Recording Into A DAW Is Different From Recording Onto Tape

William Wittman made an excellent point in his recent post on the history of drum recording. He said:

In today’s DAW world, we have so many brilliant options for manipulating sound after the fact should allow you to feel more comfortable with simpler mic approaches, not less so.

This got me thinking, It’s true that when we only had analogue processing available, one of the only options we had available to us, when we wanted to focus in on a particular element, was to add another mic. This is no longer the case but sometimes we are so dazzled by the possibilities of virtually unlimited track counts that we take the excitement that an engineer years ago would have felt when moving from 16 to 24 tracks to it’s logical but potentially absurd conclusion.

Oxford Drum Gate is one such example. Being able to discern between the spill and wanted sounds in terms of what they are rather than how loud they might be in a particular area of the spectrum means that we have options available to us which simply didn’t exist before without manual editing, which can be effective but is very labour intensive.

Less Is More

In the free video Julian demonstrates just how quick it is to set up Oxford Drum Gate. He uses the default setting and barely touches it to get great results from a spill heavy kick mic and layering just the snare from a room mic. A few extras from the Oxford EQ and Dynamics plugins and a natural, balanced kit sound is quickly achieved. Thanks to Gareth Young at Cube Recording for the drum tracks.

Sonnox 50% Off Summer Deal Ends July 6th 2020

if you like what you have heard get a copy of these plugins, including Oxford Drum Gate with 50% off here.