Drum recording and production is one of the trickiest tasks an engineer can take on: the margin for error is high when you’re tracking multiple sound sources at once, and once you’re at the mixing stage, recordings from overheads and room mics can be time-consuming and difficult to balance.
Acon Digital has released a pair of AI-powered plugins designed to help tackle these issues and make drum production faster, easier and more efficient: Remix:Drums and DeBleed:Drums.
Building on the same concept as Acon Digital’s Remix plugin, a stem separation tool released in 2023, Remix:Drums isolates individual elements in drum recordings, giving you the power to apply targeted processing to each component of an existing recording, rebalance their levels or simply remove them altogether. Unlike most existing stem separation tools, this is all accomplished in real-time in your DAW.
Remix:Drums has the potential to be a exceptionally useful tool for drum production
Place an instance of Remix:Drums on a drum track, and the plugin will separate the signal into six percussive stem, splitting these across a mixer with individual output level meters and giving you independent control over kicks, snares, hi-hats, cymbals and toms, with an additional channel for other percussive sounds.
Each of these can be soloed, muted, and panned, and you’re able to adjust a sensitivity dial for each group that fine-tunes the plugin’s separation algorithm to heighten its reactivity to each percussive element. The six stems can then be routed to multiple outputs to be mixed on separate tracks, if your DAW allows it.
Remix:Drums has the potential to be a exceptionally useful tool for drum production, giving producers a deeper level of control when mixing overheads and room mics, for example – but could also come in handy for beatmakers working with samples, making it easier to precisely mix breakbeats and drum loops without getting into the weeds with an EQ.
Acon Digital has also released DeBleed:Drums, an AI-powered drum production tool designed to remove microphone bleed in drum recordings that the company says avoids common issues presented by more conventional techniques such as noise gating.
DeBleed:Drums employs neural networks to isolate five drum sounds – kick, snare, hi-hat, cymbals and toms – and reduce unwanted mic spill down to a level set by its Floor control. Sensitivity and Trigger Threshold controls can be used to fine-tune its bleed removal, which is visualized on a handy central display.
Remix:Drums is priced at $49 and DeBleed:Drums is priced at $99, but both can be purchased together for a bundled price of $119. Both plugins are compatible with macOS and Windows and available in VST3/AU/AAX formats.
