Wow. I’m glad I decided to look for additional reviews of Smart Gate. I demoed and passed on this Sonible plugin when it came out. Specifically, because it didn’t sound right on drums. But here in the holiday season, they’ve put it back on sale and my FOMO was kicking in. Every other review on RU-vid was crowning this as “a game changer” and “the easiest ever gate to set up!”. I thought I must have made an error during the demo, as it was just no where close to the results I can achieve with Oxford Drum Gate (on Drums). This thing isn’t magic. It’s good (especially on vocals) but never achieved anything I couldn’t do with pretty much every other gate I own. Thanks for your honest opinion - I’m now a Better Mixes subscriber.
I'm glad I could save you some money! Yeah, I remember seeing all the raving reviews when this first came out; I was super excited about it, but then yeah...it just wasn't awesome. That's exactly why I wanted to make this video.
Haha yup. I REALLY like Silencer on snare. The ghost note button is brilliant and makes my life so much easier. I usually end up using Oxford on kick and toms as the detection in Silencer can be a little hit or miss for me on toms and I like Oxford's leveler on kick. But yeah, it's a great plugin!
Great video! I've compared Sound Radix Drum Leveler and Oxford Drum Gate.... Oxford Drum Gate is BY FAR easier to dial in and has better features, like its multi-band gate settings, drum-specific detector, and a 2nd leveler setting for ghost notes!
I have the exact opposite experience. I've been using Oxford for a year or two and found Smart Gate to be easier to dial in to get it more reliable and as good sounding or better than Oxford. Especially with repeated hits of varying dynamics, particularly ghost notes. And the retrospective time graph makes it super fast to dial it in, I find.
Interesting! Obviously it's all personal preference (especially the release curve thing; the people at Sonible clearly liked that shape, just not me!), and I really wanted to like Smart Gate because of how well the AI detection worked, but it just wasn't happening for me. I'm glad you found a tool that works for you though!
Sonnox sounds better but requires some technical expertise. Sonible gives pretty much instant effects and it will get better with future releases. I have both.
The clear winner is the ability to learn and or remove transients es especially on really hard to gate drums. At timecode 4:00 the smartgate sounded like absolute shite. There was like an echo after the toms. Thats awful Sonnox for the win. (on drums of course).
I tried that (I cut most of that out of the video as it was getting a little long), but it just didn't do it for me personally. I could totally see it working for some people, but I just didn't get along with either the sound or the amount of fiddling I needed to get something I kinda liked. Again, not knocking it if it works for you! Just wanted to point out an alternative that I prefer (especially since that alternative happened to be on a good sale!).
So I will be mixing a lot of fast metal with blastbeats and super fast snare to tom and back kind of fills… i like the sound i hear from the Sonnox here but cant decide now that both are on sale. What do you think? Thanks! Good video btw
I don't do much metal, but I do mix the occasional hardcore track, and the Sonnox gate handles that stuff quite well! The leveler section can be really helpful for that kind of drumming too. Since the drummer will usually play blast beats and double kick sections a bit quieter, the leveler can bring those up a little bit to match the rest of the performance. And I'm glad you liked the video!
