Drum Loops: What Software Brings Them to Life?

[tommyzai]

What plugin do you run your drum loops through to make them punch and sparkle? Any one particular plugin that really brings drum loops to life?

[morphex]

Are you wanting to know about plug-ins that are specifically for mixing duties, creative effects, or both?

[imrae]

Same answer as every question about mix effects: it depends what problem you are trying to solve.

Clean gain will add punch and sparkle, but you might need to remove some other elements.

[eBlue]

Most of the plugins based off of the DBX-160 compressor will do the trick. Universal Audio makes the official one but there are others by Native Instruments and other companies. My current favorite is the FCE-118 from Fuse Audio Labs.

[tommyzai]

Are you wanting to know about plug-ins that are specifically for mixing duties, creative effects, or both?

Not necessarily FX, but sweetening (punch, clarity, etc) drum loops for mixing.

[HOTF]

Live's Drum Bus stock device is amazing and my go to for giving life to drums. It has 2 stages of saturation, compression a transient shaper section, some high frequency dampening and a sub oscillator section to add weight to kicks. You could probably recreate a similar effect chain with the plugins of your choice.

[cryophonik]

Transient designer is always a great way to add (or subtract) some punch, bite, sparkle, etc. Also, there are plenty of FSU plugins like Cableguy's ShaperBox, Devious Machines Infiltrator, Sugar Bytes Effectrix, etc., that can go from subtle changes to complete obliteration of drum loops.

[JiggSaw]

I literally have a "Drum Bus/Drum Loop Processing" filter set up in Live for this purpose. Helps with my workflow. I'll list some (I'm not going to list them all lol) that's in there. There's a ton of different things you can use though.

CamelCrusher, Drum Buss, DS-10 Drum Shaper, Impact, Plugins that KNOCK

[osiris]

Pancz

[morphex]

I’ve been experimenting with some plug-ins from Yum-Audio to get my rhythm tracks to really snap, and have the kind of low end that you can feel on a quality sound system.

Check out their “Slap by Mr. Bill” multi-effect, “Crispy Clip” and “Grater” if you’re interested in extreme compression and aggressive processing.

These three effects have added a modern edge that makes the drums slice right through my mix. They work really well for all kinds of dance music. And the level of sculpting capabilities is awesome!

For more creative stuff, I like to use Minimal Audio’s Rift 2, Output’s Thermal and the Soundtoys 5.4+ Bundle. For truly outrageous beat-mangling, Devious Machine’s Infiltrator 2 is hard to beat, although there are some other great effects out there. But I use that a lot.

It’s right at home in the most extreme bass music, or the most delicate ambient score. All of the these suggestions are based from my own personal experience. You may have a different taste in mixing and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Any one of these VST’s can have a positive impact on your drums. Good luck!!

[hey212]

Omnipressor is the drum god. It can give them a little spank, or turn them inside out and show them their own guts.

Shape Shifter by Aberrant is also a lot of fun.

[thecontrolcentre]

Thermal can do subtle or complete overkill if you so desire. I've used it on a lot of drum loops recently. Crisps them up nicely, adds presence. I think it's still 50% off most places atm.

Shape Shifter by Aberrant DSP ^^ is indeed another good one

[DNAudio]

Are you wanting to know about plug-ins that are specifically for mixing duties, creative effects, or both?

Not necessarily FX, but sweetening (punch, clarity, etc) drum loops for mixing.

Generally I find running fairly resonant EQ boosts into a particularly snappy compressor yields nice results. airwindows ResEQ 2 & VOS SlickEQ are great for this, with the latter offering nice saturation without ever truly reaching "distortion" territory. TDR Kotelnikov can be very snappy at ~3-10ms attack, short peak release & low crest factor, but specific values depend on the drum loop. Cytomic The Glue is also good for this task.
This process will guarantee some fairly pronounced peaks. Good! Make transients loud and defined, if anything, REDUCE the gain afterwards to lessen the impact of your mastering limiter/clipper on the signal. But, if you do run into trouble, hard clipping is always the way to go for drums for me. apShaper has the lowest aliasing for this purpose.
This is the obvious stuff, some less obvious include extreme fine tuning of a reverb send track (& the stereo image that comes with it)
I always advise avoiding overprocessing of tracks though, do a lot with little. Good plugins are powerful in their limitations yet have infinite versatility.

[thecontrolcentre]

Devious Machine’s Infiltrator 2 is hard to beat

Another really good one ... we're pretty spoiled for choice with "betterisers" these days, altho Infiltrator 2 is a lot more than just that.

[plexuss]

I like using SoundRadix Drum Leveler https://www.soundradix.com/products/drum-leveler/