The Drum Hits from Plugin Alliance is a collection of plug-ins with an emphasis on drum processing, providing the basic tools for drum mixing. The SPL Transient Designer combined with elysia´s punchy compressor can hugely impact drum levels. Also available are a bass drum enhancer that works on individual channels and on drum busses and master channels, plus a limiter from Brainworx.
The bx_boom! from Brainworx is a simple bass drum sound enhancement plug-in featuring only two parameters and an intuitive graphic design for tuning, attenuating, or boosting the impact of a bass drum sound. The plug-in can be used on individual sounds, but also to treat the bass drum sound in a stereo drum loop. The mono version is a very easy and useful EQ when used on a bass-drum insert.
The bx_limiter from Brainworx is a simple but effective low latency limiter plug-in with features that make it an excellent mastering tool, but also useful for mixing duties. Use the dry/wet control to smash up drum beats, pull up vocal details in mixes, control bass sounds, etc., and then seamlessly blend from linked to unlinked mode for stereo mastering.
Additional processing can be achieved by driving individual tracks or stems hard into the limiter to trigger saturation while still maintaining overall levels. Parallel processing can create vintage drum and vocal sounds or special effects of all kinds. And in this case it is important to keep multiple-track peak levels under control, rather than trying to do all the work on the master buss.
The mpressor from elysia is a native based plug-in that closely emulates the company's hardware creative compressor. The original's all discrete circuitry and special characters have been translated into software in great detail, delivering a universal compressor as well as a dynamic effects machine.
Functions include Auto Fast that makes life easy even on longer attack settings and the Anti Log feature offers an alternative release curve that can be engaged for instant pumping effects. In addition to standard ratios, the plug-in also provides negative values.
The gain reduction limiter regulates the virtual control voltage and keeps even the most extreme settings under control and the additional filter is a perfect for changing the sound character of the compressed signal. An external sidechain input adds further flexibility.
All the major plug-in formats are supported for both 32- and 64-bit operating systems.
Transient Designer from SPL is a dynamics processor plug-in modeled after the company's well respected analog hardware. It approaches the issue in a very different way to conventional compressors in that it has two main controls that can reshape the attack and sustain characteristics of any audio file.
Amplifying or attenuating these two components of a sound opens up much greater possibilities for sound shaping than can be achieved using a chain of compressors. Level-independent processing means that threshold setting is not necessary, while other common controls, such as ratio or parameters for time-constants, are automated and optimized in a musical manner.
Additionally, internal code supports mouse wheel control for the rotary controls. Place the mouse cursor over a control and move the scroll wheel to adjust the setting.