Take Control of Your Drums

Even though various equalizers and compressors are vital to mixing drums, some tools are making a significant change because they save time and energy. Check out the following tutorial and learn how to take control of your drums.

MDrumEnhancer

MDrumEnhancer is a powerful, unique processor that enhances or completely transforms your audio material. Using the information extracted from high-quality samples creates a process and resynthesizes the signal. Then, it blends that with your original signal, allowing you to change the characteristics of your drum hits. For example, you can add a snap to a kick, noise, or body to a snare or drastically change the original sound for creative use. Therefore, it provides incredible control of the plugin's advanced feature set.

Furthermore, it's easy to use and gives excellent-sounding results in just a few clicks. In this tutorial, we will look at how to use the MDrumEnhancer and how it can outperform traditional processors such as drum replacers and equalizers. To begin, we have made a new SoundBridge pattern containing drums, bass, and a melodic sequence.

So, let's place an instance of MDrumEnhancer on the "808 Clap" channel. But first, let us hear how this drum sound sounds unprocessed.

~808 Clap / unprocessed

Here, we can see a very straightforward interface. We will review the main parameters I frequently use, but there is so much more "underneath the hood." Consequently, feel free to dive in deeper.

Let's Start

The first thing to do will be to choose the sample that will be used to resynthesize the original sound, and we can find that section on the bottom left. What's more, a handy parameter is "PITCH, "which you can use to tune the final sound according to the root note of the track itself. In the section above, we see quite a few parameters, which are:

Gate

Controls the minimum input level. It also allows you to deal with low-level leakage from other drums.

Compression

Controls the level adjustment on the enhancement signal, which suggests a compression type, hence the control name.

Delay

It lets you delay the enhancement signal to the input (positive values). Also, you can wait for the input to the enhancement signal (negative values). Furthermore, it then looks ahead and reports the delay as latency so that the host can compensate and keep the timing correct.

Sustain

Controls how slowly the enhancement signal fades away. Use low values to make the output follow the original signal tightly. Moreover, you can simulate the "big" sound and even a short reverb with high values.

Character

Controls the enhancement signal type. Different values sound different, so it is advised to set this by trial and error or leave it as default. The basic idea is that the processor enhances the original input and creates an entirely new enhancement signal. Consequently, the character controls the ratio between them. Here is how the "808 Clap "sounds after being processed with MDrumEnhancer.

~808 Clap - MDrumEnhancer

As you can hear, it dramatically changes character, warmth, space, and many other things. Additionally, let's process the "Tom "and the "Live Clap "sounds with MDrumEnhancer. Finally, here is how they sound without and with the plugin.