This plugin works.

The de-bleed feature on this plugin heavily reduces cymbal bleed from spot mics on kick, snare and toms. It changes the tonality a tiny bit with heavy bleed, but that can be adjusted later and with most reasonably recorded tracks it's pretty transparent when you combine the de-bleed with the traditional gating features.

Silencer is particularly effective in isolating toms where the drummer prefers his cymbals low and/or loud, slushy hihats. There's reverse settings for bleed that can be used to reduce snare bleed into a hihat mic... alternately I tried multing the hihat track with the snare bleed isolated by silencer on the mult out of phase from the dry track with great shinata. With some gentle eq I was able to cancel lots of snare from an sm81 pointed straight at the edge if the hat.

Silencer produces clean kick, snare and tom tracks that you can process with abandon and never have to worry about bits of cymbal popping up to shift the stereo image from your overhead and room tracks. The 'ghost' button works great on delicate snare work and busy, dynamic kick and tom patterns. I was particularly impressed with how it handled a floor tom track where the drummer was riding the tom in the verses with a lot of touch on different parts of the head. Took the rest if the kit out while preserving all those overtones nicely even though I had used a condenser to capture his fancy tom work.

I have a few quibbles with Silencer. The side chain button is worthless although maybe I'm not using it right? It doesn't have any filter parameters and keying the gate is nothing special. The GUI goes wonky sometimes, resizing itself to be enormous in most DAWs, but can be shrunk easily... its tolerable and I'm typically setting and forgetting Silencer so it's a minor issue.

I will never use another ITB gate for drums unless someone improves in this spectral reduction idea. Silencer just slays. I can't say I won't ever use another valley or drawmer for drums, hardware has a sound for sure, but that's more to get a specific attack or decay and some grit. A dynamite or keypex can put a nice point on your kick but silencer just gets all the bullshit out of a spot mic leaving pretty much what you tried to record and nothing else.... that's why we started gating in the first place, right? Black Salt offers a 14 day free trial, try it for yourself and I assure you that you're going to buy it too. Not bad for 50USD.

Buy if you record fiddly, dynamic drummers with a spot mic on every drum... skip if you just do vintage style drums or programmed drums.