Sound Radix Drum Leveler

[Timmy Tatel]

I recently purchased Drum Leveler to use for live sound processing with my Reaper DAW. All my VST plugins process the drum sound without added latency. However, when I activate the Drum Leveler VST it creates noticeable latency. Why, how is this fixed?

Drums are always interesting to mix. Simply bringing together and balancing as many as 20 or 30 mics is an art in itself. Perhaps because of this, there seem to be more plugins made specifically for mixing drums than just about any other instrument.

Sound Radix only makes a few plugins, but each of them is truly special. Drum Leveler comes in as my first essential drum mixing plugin because it solves one of the most significant issues with live, multi-tracked drums: Bleed.

Noise gates have come and gone from my arsenal, some with more success than others. They can be frustrating enough to work with that it seems many engineers avoid them altogether, opting to work around bleed in other ways, whether by using samples, cutting dead space, or just working on optimizing their mic positioning and selection.

Trigger is a fully-featured drum replacement plugin. It allows you to load up to eight different samples and blend them however you want, along with the natural sound. You can tweak the samples further with controls for dynamics and velocity range, giving you the options to mold the sound to fit your live kit more naturally.

What I really love about Trigger is how simple it is to use. Despite being very flexible, everything makes sense within the plugin. In true Slate fashion, the important stuff is put up front while more complex options are just a few clicks away.

Phase is one of the silent killers of great drum tracks. Especially for those just starting out, it can be hard to tell when something is out of phase, leading to disastrous results down the line. This plugin helps fix it at the source, and cuts out all of the labor of zooming in to line up transients when needed.

Setting up Auto Align can be a bit confusing at first. You start out by selecting a track to send a signal that all other instances of the plugin will receive. There is no particular track you must select, but I have found that using one of your overhead mics will generally work best.

Clipping, in this context, means simulating the kind of pleasant transient shaving that a good A/D or D/A converters can add to a track. Like any type of distortion, this cuts off the peak of a signal, taming those peaks instantaneously and adding attractive harmonic distortion, without you having to worry about attack and release times.

I often use this to deal with the nasty frequencies of overhead tracks that stick out too much in a mix. Instead of a wide bell that dulls the excitement of the cymbals, the multi-band compressor will react to the natural dynamics of the player, and only kick in at the moments those areas get too harsh for comfort.

Both the EQ and compressor here sound great. Putting the compressor across a drum bus with a little bit of light compression can really breathe life into drum tracks. Dancing around 2-4 dB in gain reduction, that iconic SLL compression just adds a subtle ebb and flow to the drums, especially if you time your release correctly.

The beautiful thing about a Distressor is that it breaks the conventions of compression. For every signal, there seems to be a sweet spot, with a hair-line between too little and too much. When you find that spot (which can only be found my messing around), the compressor makes drum tracks pop in all of the right spots.

For more great insights into both mixing and mastering, try our full-length courses with SonicScoop editor Justin Colletti, Mixing Breakthroughs and Mastering Demystified.

if you are going to talk about drum plugins, you need to include transient shapers, which to much more than compressors to control the attack and sustain of drums, the tightness, or looseness of drums with the compressor pumping

By definition, I suppose Drum Leveler is a compressor/ expander/gate, but in use, it doesn't act or sound like one. Drum Leveler is designed with one purpose: to transparently even out the levels of individual drum hits. So unlike traditional compressors, it analyzes incoming audio to find each drum hit, then applies gain to push the hit towards a target output level. Have you ever sliced apart drum tracks in your DAW so you could use clip-gain to change the volume of inaudibly quiet hits or crazy-loud "I got excited" snares? This plug-in basically does that for you.

There are no attack and release controls (although there is a knob for Recovery); and within reason, drum sounds don't change in "shape" or envelope, as they would with a compressor. Therefore, if you want the sound of an 1176 on snare, for example, use it in addition to Drum Leveler. A nice side-effect of compressing after application of Drum Leveler is that the compressor's detector will work more consistently, since its incoming transient levels are... level.

One last feature worth mentioning is the gate. The analysis-based engine means that Drum Leveler doesn't work or sound anything like traditional noise gates. The Gate Range knob is powerful and almost seems like a magic bleed-remover. That said, a little goes a long way; the output of the gate can quickly get too artifact-ridden for my liking.

Speaking of automation, Drum Leveler automates well, and I recommend taking advantage of that. For instance, snare rolls will never sound good through this kind of processing, so if I have Drum Leveler on a snare track, I'll automate bypassing of these sections. You might also try duplicating a track to process certain sections differently. For instance, on a thrash-metal kick drum, put all of the double-kick sections on their own track, then apply Drum Leveler on that track more aggressively and with different hold/recovery settings.

Traditional dynamic processors (compressors, expanders, gates...) detect levels of input samples and transform them depending on the transfer curve. This means that the gain is changing on every sample. This can be very well used to shape the sound itself, but it is hard to make it transparent if you want to level individual drum hits. MDrumLeveler on the other hand analyzes the incoming audio, detects events (drum hits for example) in it and transforms them in some way. By that approach it adjusts the level of each event, but does not alter the actual sound or color, so the results are unbelievably transparent.

No drummer's performance is perfect, each hit has a different velocity, and difference in levels are even exaggerated by the recording equipment. But there is a very high standard for perfection in performances for most modern styles. Vocalists regularly use an automatic tuner, drummers now have MDrumLeveler. It can even out drum hit levels, so the performance will just sound perfect even if, well, it is not.

Traditionally you use gates to attenuate the audio in between separate hits in order to remove ambience and leakage from other instruments. That is necessary for modern tight mixes and is very hard to accomplish with standard tools. MDrumLeveler can do it with unbelievable ease and provides unbelievable results thanks to the advanced event-based processing.

MDrumLeveler lets you shape the envelope of each drum hit. Whether you want a longer body or a faster release, it is no problem for MDrumLeveler. And you don't need to spend hours experimenting, MDrumLeveler gives you direct control of these parameters.

Drum recordings are rarely flawless, usually contain lots of leakage, ambience, artifacts... MDrumLeveler's event detector is highly adjustable. Among other settings, you can use 2 parallel resonant band-pass filters to target the dominant frequencies of the drum in which you are interested.

MDrumLeveler's job cannot be done without looking "into the future". By default it looks 20ms ahead, which provides 100% accuracy for all standard drums. But you can get much lower - in most cases look-ahead below 5ms still works perfectly, good enough for using it live. MDrumLeveler can know how hard you hit the drum just a few milliseconds after you do it.

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Rather than offering traditional threshold and ratio settings, it combines two thresholds (Hi and Lo) with a Target level and Compression amount (+/-0 to 100%). Lo works much like a typical compressor threshold, while Hi acts as an upper level limit.

Together they define a signal level range within which beats can be targeted. The Compression amount sets the percentage by which any beat falling within this range will have gain individually applied to it to match the Target Level, 100% representing a 1:1 mapping. Further to that, negative Compression settings result in expansion.

Four further controls flank the Compression knob, too: Gain Range puts a cap on the gain applied (0-80dB), while Minimum Retrigger sets a minimum time (0-500ms) before the detection algorithm is allowed to detect the next discrete beat. Hold Time and Recovery Time both influence how long the gain change is applied for.

Not only does Drum Leveler do a great job of levelling user-targeted beats, it's also surprisingly easy to get to grips with. The adjustment of the three levelling parameters - Hi Threshold, Lo Threshold and Target Level - directly in the main waveform display makes pinpointing thresholds a doddle; and thanks to the colour coding, you can easily see any gain change and whether it's positive or negative.

On a full drum kit mix, it's quite possible to reduce or even totally notch out individual hits. At the other end of the usage scale, if you want to boost levels for specific beats, that's an option, too.

The Hold and Recovery settings have a considerable influence on how Drum Leveler sounds, and much like the release stage on a regular compressor, with time spent here, you can achieve everything from heavy, gate-like pumping to smooth, transparent gain reduction.

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