Arturia has unveiled a new drum processing plugin developed in partnership with Emre Ramazanoglu, a producer and mix engineer that’s worked with Brian Eno, David Bowie, Sia and more.
Mix DRUMS brings together a number of effects in a streamlined interface to help you craft impactful, professional-sounding drum mixes with ease. It’s designed to be used across a variety of applications, from creative transformations to precise drum bus enhancement, aiming to bring weight, power and clarity to lifeless drum parts.
The plugin features a dual-band architecture that splits the signal into low and mid/high bands visualized on its spectrum analyzer, each with dedicated distortion, dynamics and tonal shaping options. There’s a variety of distortion models onboard covering both analogue and digital styles, including emulations of tape machines, tube amps, fuzz pedals and more.
“This plugin recreates and actually improves upon one particular workflow I use when creating characterful drum sounds in a mix”
Emre Ramazanoglu
Mix DRUMS’ phase-coherent design ensures that parallel processing combining dry, distorted and compressed signals won’t present any problems at the output, avoiding the phase issues that can occur when multiple signal paths are misaligned. There’s also automated gain staging at the input stage, along with a signal path clipper at the output, designed to boost perceived loudness and tame peak levels without introducing unwanted harshness and distortion.
The plugin’s Space section houses two types of reverb (algorithmic and convolution), a digital delay and tape delay emulation, and its Noise feature introduces layers of vinyl crackle, tape hiss and digital noise to the mix pre- or post-processing for additional texture. Mix DRUMS’ arrives with a selection of 40 artist-curated, genre-tagged presets split into three stylistic categories, covering everything from organic, natural-sounding, tones to dramatic and experimental effects.
“This plugin recreates and actually improves upon one particular workflow I use when creating characterful drum sounds in a mix, or for increasing the impact of delivered stereo drum loops without raising peak level,” Ramazanoglu says.
“I wanted an all-in-one solution to achieve the retro-inspired but full-range and weighty drum sounds that I get hired to deliver — as well as everything from fully creative transformational processes to very subtle drum bus enhancements.”
Compatible with macOS and Windows, Mix DRUMS is available now in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats and priced at €99.
