Drum Room:

Kramer Pie (Waves)

– TLDR Notes:

Good for giving extra movement to the drum room. Use 4xOS.

– Review:

The Pye compressor was a staple in studios in the 60s and 70s and for good reason. A popular choice on drums, guitars and vocals for its musical character.

It’s nice to have a modeled compressor that can give you that thing in the box, and the Waves version is a really strong emulation of the classic hardware unit, somewhat of a gem in the Waves catalog.

So why put a compressor on a drum room?

Well, sometimes you just want a bit of movement, other times you might want to be more experimental and see how a smashed, distorted, heavily eq’ed drum room will add personality to the track.

This one does both the gentle and the heavy compression musically for drum room application.

It does not currently have an oversampling option, so I like to do it in the DAW (4xOS).

If your DAW doesn’t offer oversampling for plugins you can run it via the useful DDMF metaplugin.

The Rocket (Stillwell Audio)

– TLDR Notes:

Good for smashing a drum room. The above setting is to be used in parallel and is the “all buttons in”-trick by clicking the “All” button.

Note that “Decadence” is also pushed in, which is oversampling.

Can also be cool in parallel on the drum bus.

– Review:

As the name suggests, this is a fast one. An 1176 on steroids. It also happens to be a bit of a vintage piece of code at this point, and yet it still hold up today.

Something about the GUI makes you want to drive it hard and see what it can do, and The Rocket shines on drum room with heavy compression in parallel.

Add a bit of  saturation/drive either via the “Impetus” saturation control or a separate plugin if more heavy drive is needed, EQ out the lows and the highs, so you get an overdriven, mid-centric, pumpy drumroom underneath the drum kit for a cool ‘industrial’ type sound.

Parallel Aggressor (BABY Audio)

– TLDR Notes:

Easy to use one-stop solution for drum room compression and color.

– Review:

When I first tried this one I thought “Why didn’t someone think of this plugin before?”.

You don’t have to place it on a separate track that you send signal into, you just place it on the drum room track.

You don’t have to reach for another plugin for the overdrive, you just use the “heat” control.

Easy to get extra punch with the “Extra Punch” boxing glove knob.

You can enable “low preserve” or “Hi-cut” for yet more tone shaping.

But mostly I like the energy it provides, the movement of the smack on a drum kit, tailor made for parallel compression!