Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we're going to review a very interesting piece of software, which can help a mix engineer solving some a recording problem which is almost impossible to avoid completely: the bleed of the various parts of the drumset in the microphones that captures the single drum parts.
Let's start by saying this: to get a clear drum track, the ideal would be when recording to have the single parts with isolated sounds (or minimum spill), to be able to process them individually without processing the "bleed" and then add thickness and depth with the overhead microphones and/or the room mike.
In order to cut away the unwanted bleed from the tracks, so far mix engineers have relied on gates, a tool that lowers to zero all the signal below a certain threshold, leaving just the audio peaks higher than that.
The use of a gate has some intrinsic problem: for example if you are playing a heavyle gated snare, if the drummer plays a press roll part or a ghost note, it will probably be gated, plus an excessively strong use of gate can make the drum to sound too artificial, by eating away frequences and resonances even from the part of the sound left.
Drumatom is a software that tries to change the way mix engineers process their drum tracks, by eliminating the bleed of the other drum parts without any sensible detriment to the main sound, and letting you reintroduce part of what has been eliminated, giving you the opportunity to choose its amount, leaving the track clean but more natural sounding compared to using a traditional gate.
The way it works it's pretty simple: you import the drum tracks (or part of tracks, if the track is too long it's better to divide it to make it easier to process) and once Drumatom has analyzed all the tracks you just have to tell it what part of the drumset it is (e.g. snare, kick...) and from there you have only 3 controls:
- Focus: to decide how much of the spill to remove
- Fine Tune: to choose how much of the spill to reintroduce
- A/B: to compare the processed track with the original version.
Once you have processed all the tracks you need you can export them back to a folder to use on your Daw, or, using the plugin Drumatom Player (sold separately) you can route the tracks directly inside your Daw.
This is a very interesting piece of software that can really change the way mix engineers can work acoustic drum tracks, the only thing we can expect with the future releases is real time processing, and the possibility of doing everything from inside the Daw without having to pass from an external program (Drumatom), using another one inside the Daw to link it (Drumatom Player): I'm sure we'll get there very soon.
You can check out an interesting video on how this software work taken from the official Accusonus Youtube Channel:
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