Drum Mix Essentials
Plug-in Collection
About the Drum Mix Essentials
A drum mix comes down to four decisions: how much weight the shells carry, how the transients land, how hard the kit hits as a whole, and how much of the room survives the journey. Drum Mix Essentials is four plug-ins, one for each of those decisions.
Shape it, then control it
VEQ-1P is our Pultec EQP-1A. It earns its place on drums for the trick the hardware is famous for: boost and cut the same low band at once and you get weight without mud, because the boost and attenuation curves don't overlap. Kick drums have been treated this way since the 1950s and it still works. KH-COMP1 is the signature compressor built with Koen Heldens, and on a drum bus it's the one that decides how hard the kit hits. These two do the heavy lifting; the other two decide what it sounds like.
Colour and glue
Magnetite is modelled on Studer reel-to-reel machines, with the Class-A amplifiers, NAB equalisation and the gentle level-dependent compression that tape gives you whether you ask for it or not. On drums that last part is the point: tape rounds the peaks before a compressor ever sees them, so the kit gets louder without getting flatter. Edelweiss`72 is a full mixing and mastering channel strip, and on a drum bus it handles the tidying that would otherwise need three more plug-ins.
A chain that makes sense in order
The useful sequence is strip, EQ, compressor, tape: Edelweiss`72 to clean up and set the level, VEQ-1P to put the weight back, KH-COMP1 to control what's left, Magnetite across the bus to round the peaks and tie it together. That's not a rule, but it's the order these four were chosen for. Each one also stands on its own, which matters if you already own one of them.
Useful well beyond drums
The name describes the intent, and the four travel further than that. VEQ-1P is a Pultec, and Pultecs have sat across master busses for seventy years. Magnetite suits anything that benefits from being rounded, which is most things. Edelweiss`72 is a full mixing and mastering strip and works on whatever you put through it. KH-COMP1 handles vocals and bass as readily as a kit. Buy it for the drums, keep it for everything else.
Drum Mix Essentials Features
Authentic circuit emulation
Our real-time component based circuit simulation approach allows for authentically capturing the sound and feel of the analog unit as close as possible. All the crucial parts, including in- and output transformers, sidechain and audio path tube stages, filters and of course the T4A cell have been faithfully modeled and matched with an original '68 reference unit.
SSE2 optimized code
DSP operations are pipelined using the SSE2 instruction set. This ensures high-performance operation despite very complex computations.
Auto-adjusted oversampling for maximum audio transparency
Aliasing artifacts are efficiently attenuated using a low latency linear phase Dolph-Chebyshev polyphase design. The oversampling rate is auto-adjusted to your session's sample rate to save CPU while offering the most transparent sound possible.
HighDPI / Retina support
Our user interfaces support high pixel density on both Windows and Mac OS systems to present you with the most enjoyable user experience on high DPI displays. Please refer to your manual to learn whether your DAW is HighDPI capable if you're working on Windows.
Plugins in the Drum Mix Essentials
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Magnetite
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VEQ-1P
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Edelweiss`72
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KH-COMP1
