DrumFixer is an audio plugin designed to help mixing engineers achieve better sounding drums. The basic idea is to damp frequencies in the drum sound that ring out too long.
Place the DrumFixer plugin on a track that contains a single drum sound. In our example, we will use the plugin on a snare drum track. Press the listen button, and then play a single drum hit through the plugin. DrumFixer will record the drum sound, and display the sound as a spectrogram.
Note which frequencies seem to ring out too long. Hover your mouse over those frequencies on the spectrogram and click to choose a frequency, bandwidth, and decay time. DrumFixer will then create a filter that damps the drum sound at that frequency to achieve the desired decay time.
Each time a filter is created, it is added to the filter list to the left of the spectrogram. From this list, you can edit the filter characteristics, or delete the filter.
Each time you create a filter in DrumFixer, the plugin analyzes the recorded drum sound by filtering out the frequencies of the drum sound that the filter will be affecting. DrumFixer then estimates the decay characteristic of the drum within that frequency band, and determines the necessary amount of damping needed at that frequency to achieve the desired decay time. Finally, every time a new drum hit is detected passing through the plugin, the filter dynamically adjusts the gain of the frequencies being processed by the filter to apply the damping effect to the drum sound.
For a more in-depth explanation, feel free to checkout this
python Notebook.
The original idea for this plugin was developed by Mark Rau, and inspired by the GASP working group at CCRMA.
The code in this repository is licensed under the GPLv3.
The audio samples in the Snares/ folder are licensed under
the Creative Commons License. For more information, see
Snares/_readme_and_license.txt.