SoundRadix Drum Leveler -- miracle worker

[mhschmieder]

I thought I had posted about this earlier, but did a quick search and got no hits. Sorry if it's a repeat; this is a quick hit & run but I wanted to alert people to this amazing and unique product as I believe its introductory sale price of $99 ends tonight. I haven't had time for the forum lately; including tonight. Recording/mixing/producing almost non-stop these days.

http://www.soundradix.com/products/drum-leveler

SoundRadix DrumLeveler takes a unique approach to compressing drum sounds, allowing for more flexibility than usual. I would compare this to a front end for drum replacement software, minus the drum replacement. In other words, it has a similar beat detection engine (and parameter set), but uses this to selectively compress the signal.

I had a specific need for this sort of solution, on some recordings that I am finishing up the production of this week. The inside kick mic had way too much snare bleed, to the point that the snare and the kick sound were almost at the same level. Gating didn't work, or EQ, nor did standard compression techniques.

Using SoundRadix DrumLeveler, I was able to set an appropriate threshold to eliminate the snare bleed, only miss a few occasional double-kick weaker hits (which are adequately covered by the overheads and the outside kick mic), and set the frequency range for the side-chain compression to act on, effectively eliminating all frequencies between the kick body sound and the kick beater click sound.

This plug-in has other purposes as well, which I'll get to later, such as effectively splitting overhead-only drum recordings into individual drum tracks for remix and better processing.

SoundRadix has some other interesting plug-ins as well; most of them unique problem-solvers. And, of course, they are the force behind "32 Lives" which a lot of people are using to keep their 32-bit plug-ins operational in a 64-bit world.

[waitsongs]

Thanks for the quick review and reminder, mhschmieder! Despite having a bit too much wine at a New Years Eve Party, I was able to buy this for $99 with my iPhone at 11:59 last night. It's every bit the miracle worker you described. I believe my days of struggling with too much hi hat or cymbals in the snare mic may be over! Those guys at Sound Radix are definitely onto some "next generation" plugins. Hopefully it'll go on sale again around NAMM time if anyone's interested but missed the introductory price.

[mhschmieder]

That's great to hear, and amazing that you snuck in just under the wire with the sale deadline!

One additional note, which I may bring up with the developer later on:

For some reason, if I reduce the Output Level of the plug-in vs. using FreeG to attenuate the signal by a few dB before the next plug-in in my processing chain, I get significantly different results. Less natural sounding, and noticeably different peak and RMS levels.

Based on the rather scant User Manual, it seemed that this should be a safe way to reduce the level going to the next plug-in vs. adding a slot for a dedicated trim plug-in, but maybe it isn't the final thing in the internal signal path of DrumLeveler and/or maybe it is either deliberately coloured or possibly doesn't have a tight enough algorithm for basic gain/trim?

To clarify, the difference would be quite subtle and possibly unnoticed by a casual listener, but those of us doing professional or semi-professional production work are of course not casual.

[waitsongs]

Hmmm... I didn't notice that, but I'll keep an ear out. The only track I had to attenuate with the output faders was a tambourine track, and I ended up preferring the track with my usual compressors rather than Drum Leveler. Maybe the problem you mentioned is why I felt that way, but I didn't spend enough time deciphering the issue to say for sure. I had amazing results on kick, snare, overheads, and the drum bus, but tambourine just wouldn't cooperate before I lost patience. I'll spend a little more time playing with output adjustment and see what happens. This thing is a deceptively deep tool, so I think it's going to take awhile to learn the best ways to tweak it.