Drum plug ins, What do you use?

[meandeanmachine]

This is a pretty challenging task sometimes.
My typical plug ins consists of compression, eq, and, expansion/gating.

Any theories on your order of plug ins, or anything special out there in the market place for fattening up drums. I am curious about other aproaches.
Dean

[albee1952]

Well, I use the BF76 plugin on kick and snare along with Waves Q4 parametric. I don't care for gates. I would rather clean the track by deleting leakage or normalizing it way down or just automate the levels. Experiment with the order of compressor to EQ or EQ to compressor as each way works a bit different. I also aux buss kick, toms and sometimes snare to a stereo aux track with another 1176 plugin set to heavy compression and bring it up under the regular drum mix. This track also goes to my drum verb. I also often use a Pultec EQ on snare if it needs some CRACK.

[GothicV]

Now that I have a patchbay I have been using alot of my outboard gear!!!

However I find that my drums are usually compressed, eq'd [usually just removing the frequencies that aren't needed] and sometimes hard-limited. I try not to use too many plugs on the mater drum bus, but sometimes the mix gets a bit compressed. I often gate the toms.

[meandeanmachine]

Albee1952:
I would rather clean the track by deleting leakage or normalizing it way down or just automate the levels<<<<

All my experiments with normalizing drums it seems like I am getting a lot of extra noise, hence then gating or heavy silencing editing between drum hits. What percentage are you nornmalizing at? When you say automate the levels, are you doing this on the fly with automated faders, or are you selecting a setting in the edit section and processing through a limiter?

[dodo]

I don't use gates at all. I'll automate the volume if I want to turn something off.

[millicent frndly]

Why wouldn't you gate? Especially Toms.. I don't gate kick or snare but I most certainly gate toms. I'm just curious why you would automate faders over something as simple as a gate w/ quick attack and slow release? Just curious

[nightshadecrisis]

i usually automate the toms unless they are used alot, just because i find automating gives it a bit of life over the sterile qualities of gates, for example. that and i've always done it that way so i've become comfortable doing it as such.
my favorite plugins to use so far are:
C4(this one sounds good on almost anything!)
C1-basic compressor
Compressorbank
RenEq6
Altiverb

most of those above are waves. i tend to compress the kick and snare in a few different spots down the signal chain, and recently i've been more and more using the SSL and outboard gear at my work instead of plugins though.

hope this helps,
ev

[Petander]

Now this is a good topic, gotta bump this one up.


For basic "old school" rock stuff, I don´t mike the toms at all - if the drummer has the balance. My drummer has, I don´t engineer for living (I write music) but I can take several full days to just tweak the drums while working on an arrangement... bad craziness I know.

Anyway, Just pick them toms up from the overhead track. Sometimes they work fine as a single stereo track, compress, eq and send to a reverb or a room track expander buss. Or use Audio Suite to process the toms right there with a quality reverb. Or whatever you like, a delayed OH track can be quite impressive on toms when EQ:d and compressed, then triggered by the toms. Like a "fake room". Works with all the drums but check the mono every now and then when moving tracks.

I´ve had good luck with PSP Audiowarmer and Pultec with BD & SN, I do compress and limit drums quite a bunch. Another song may sound better with Focusrite. Sometimes gate, even after cleaning up the tracks, depends on the feel of the song. Quite easy on EQ most of the time, I use PT four channel EQ unless something else is really needed . I also record "straight and dry".

It´s a good idea to use some comp / limiter in the master buss every now and then to hear the effects of your compression - the mix gets that treatment at the mastering stage anyway. That helps me a lot, the overall balance will change depending on your individual track dynamics.

One more classic thing I like to do with gates ( wish I had more gates to play around with): copy a track, move it slightly backwards and control the gate of the "actual" track with it. Much easier to adjust and the attack will be there for sure because the gate opens before the audible signal even begins.

Playing with gate / expander / compressor / limiter ratios and releases, triggering compressed ambient track expanders ... all that is something I´m very interested in. Changing the length of the sounds makes a huge difference in the groove. Pan settings can do miracles, a mono ambience in BD leaves space for a wider stereo in SN, overheads being somewhere between the two... just playing around with all this after all these years... again. I´m lucky to have a good drummer available, that´s where it obviously comes from in the first place. I feel all this "dynamic range" talk kinda funny, we must squeeze it all in a tight package and actually create an illusion of dynamics so that it makes sense on a car radio.


Just my two cents. Nice to find out that PT works in PC this good today... I´m still surprised. Been pushing my PC limits for a couple of months now, almost 24/7. I started my personal HD recording with Atari Falcon and Cubase Audio when they first came out...


More drum tool talk, anyone?

[dodo]

I don't use them because It's another plugin and always push a mix to the max. It's really my personal preference. I'm not a big fan of gates. I rarely use them.

I want every drum to have a mic. I want as much control as possible. I'll use a compressor and eq on every track if only light compression and to roll off unwanted lows which is every track. If I run out of cpu I'll audiosuite these.

[albee1952]

Albee1952:
I would rather clean the track by deleting leakage or normalizing it way down or just automate the levels<<<<

All my experiments with normalizing drums it seems like I am getting a lot of extra noise, hence then gating or heavy silencing editing between drum hits. What percentage are you nornmalizing at? When you say automate the levels, are you doing this on the fly with automated faders, or are you selecting a setting in the edit section and processing through a limiter?

I draw in most of my automation. Select "volume" for the track and use the grabber tool(the pointing finger). Anywhere you click on the line creates a break point(which are moveable) then grab the line and pull it down 6 db or so. Or normalize to 20% or so. If normalize is adding noise, you need to figure what you are doing wrong. Experiment with normalize on a small section(just click alt-Z to undo each try) and try lots of different settings and you will get the hang of how it works.