What's up, YouTube? So today I want to talk about my five favorite plugins for drum sound design.

[Music] [Music] So I probably should also mention that this is not a sponsored video, but most

of the plugins were actually sent to me for free for various reasons. I was on the beta team for a couple of the

plugins; some of the other ones were sent to me, not from the actual developer of the plugin, but from

somebody else. Dorsum sent me Chop Sui; they were like, "Hey, you're doing drum stuff, you might like this plugin." But

then they were also like, "Hey, have you seen this? This is a friend of ours who developed this plugin; check this out"

as well. So they kind of hooked me up with a couple of other plugins as well. So it's

not sponsored in particular to anyone, and you can kind of see that even with the folks from Dorsum, they were

supporting other developers as well, and stuff. So this is kind of—I'm trying to be as impartial as possible, if you know

what I mean. So yeah, without further ado, let's dive in and have a look. So the first thing that I want to talk about

today is a good old classic that got a bit of a revamp recently. I'm talking about Sonic Academy's Kick 2, well, what

is now known as Kick 3. They recently introduced a bunch of new features alongside a much-needed GUI revamp. So

there are a couple of other plugins that do a similar thing, that like the whole new Kick 3 thing—you know, the whole

analysis and resynthesis thing. There are a couple of other plugins that do a similar thing—uh, the HS Kick Ninja

and other things like that—but I'm kind of just stuck with Kick 3 because I know it so well; I've been using it for so

Long um, I've kind of just developed a bit of a workflow, and even still, I'm not too familiar with a lot of the newer

features, just because I'm just so ingrained in the way I create kicks. So one of the cool things is like,

I said, it's the new thing that they've got where you can literally just drag in any sample, analyze it, and then use it as

um, you know, recreate the kick by just dragging it in and and by just dragging it in and letting Kick

3 kind of resynthesize it for you. The really cool thing about this, though, is that you're not actually limited to

kicks; it does a pretty good job of resynthesizing snares and all sorts of

things like that as well. So it's also a nice way of taking like a sound, like maybe maybe you have a

sample and you want to change the pitch or you want to key track it. You can take something like a tabla sound, load it up,

analyze and import, and then set this key track on. You might want to key track both layers, and then you have the ability to

kind of get that kind of clean synthesis [Music] so you can kind of redesign a drum sound

in various interesting ways. Oh, by the way, these drums that I'm using at the moment are part of a pack that I've

actually recently put out. Um, a lot of the drum sounds were created using similar techniques to what I'm going to explain

in this video, um, as well as, you know, that kind of more advanced technique I discussed in a previous video. Okay, so

the next plugin that I want to talk about is called Visco. So Visco is truly interesting because it allows you to

load up samples; it also kind of resynthesizes them in a kind of similar way to what I was explaining, but the

Cool thing about this is it kind of allows you to morph between several samples that you've loaded in and

resynthesize them. And then there are also various settings to repitch, retime, stretch them, and all sorts of stuff like

that. But then you can also do it on a global scale, so you can kind of load up eight, uh, sounds, or 16, because you can

morph between the two and then just go wild with these kind of global controls and get some really, really cool

percussion riffs. So, for a quick explanation of how it works, is, um, each layer is triggered by a different MIDI

key. Right? So here what we can do is we can apply, let's say, for example, like a rim

shot, and then drag this over to the right-hand side here, and then let's apply a snare. And now what we can do is we can

mix between the snare and the rim shot here. And this is interesting because it's not just crossfading between the two samples,

right? It's one resynthesis algorithm and another resynthesis algorithm, and then it blends those parameters, so you can

kind of get really interesting sounds in between. Let's load up some other stuff on some of the other layers. Okay, I'm

going to quickly just put in a MIDI pattern that consists of these three [Music] [Music]

notes. So these parameters can also be set individually over here on the right-hand side, like per layer, um, but then

further morphed on a global scale, so you can get some really, really interesting stuff that way. [Music]

[Music] [Music] How crazy is that? So what I usually do is I just kind of load a bunch of stuff

in, go wild, record out some takes of just kind of just going wild, and then I'll cycle through that and kind of find the

Sounds like, for example, that's how I made a lot of these tabla and other kinds of percussion sounds—by morphing

like a kick drum with a tom kind of sound, or a kick drum with a higher-pitched kick drum, or a kick drum with a

snare—all sorts of stuff. Then just morphing them in all sorts of interesting ways and seeing what happens,

and then just extracting the results. You know. [Music] [Music] Okay, so the next plugin I want to talk

about is Chop Suey. So this isn't new; I think this is actually a pretty old plugin. I think it was one of Doron's

first plugins, but this one is really, really cool because it kind of allows you to take several drum sounds that you

may have already and just mash them up and, uh, kind of see what kind of results you get. It's less of a spectral thing

like the other things I was just showing you, or a morphing thing like the other things I was just showing you. Um, it kind of

works more just on a sample level, but it's really nice because I find it a lot easier playing around with this than

doing it with actual audio files in the DAW timeline. I find that that can be very finicky. This also has a couple of

kind of global controls which make that kind of whole system just a lot easier. So what I usually use it for is just

recombining snare tones, for example: having like the sort of transient from one snare, uh, and then like the body from another

[Music] snare, uh, oopsie, I just—and then like the tail from another

snare. [Music] [Music] d [Music] You've also got these handles at the top

that can kind of do crossfades if you drag them up and down, and then you can also jump into

each layer and then offset them, adjust the phase of each layer, and the pitch and gain of each layer so you can

kind of really combine these in a methodical [Music] way. Sometimes it's nice to have your

tail slightly late, so you kind of get that kind of sound, not just a whack. You see what I'm saying? It's kind

of slightly like, instead of what it was, but sometimes you'll need to just change it up a bit so that uh, it it

fades nice and cleanly. Again, you're not limited to just snares with this thing; it comes with a bunch of

presets for kicks and all sorts of stuff, but I also use it for making more experimental kind of kick sounds, like a

lot of these uh, massive kicks that are in my um, new drum pack. A lot of these are not Cyron kicks; they're kind of more

for hip-hop, glitch-hop, drum and bass, dubstep—that kind of stuff. A lot of these were made in Chop Suey and further

post-processing, because it's really nice to kind of combine just a click transient with other things, but not in

terms of layers and not in terms of synthesis, but in terms of time. Do you know what I

mean? Uh, so let's just initialize [Music] again. Okay, so we can get a nice thick transient here from this one

kick. Can find a different body here. So you see here, if we zoom in, we can actually see that there's this

the phase is not continuous; it kind of goes down-cycle and then it goes, starts going up, and then it's another down-cycle. So

when it's stuff like that, what you want to do is you want to use this phase to just shift that layer backwards or

forwards so that you have a smoother cycle. Oh yes, so like this was the before; it's so

Subtle, but like, these things can make or break you know, with a kick sound, you only have so much time that you can play

with, so you want something which allows you this kind of more minute detail. We're going to want to do the same thing

with the tail, but let's just find a sound first. Let's find one with a long

tail. There we go. Uh, that does kind of seem a little bit continuous, so that's fine for now, I

think. Does sound [Music] good. And this is cool because now also what we can do is, once we've set this up,

we can kind of just go in, say, for example, we want a different transient, we can just change the transient without

changing too much of that body and phase relationship, you know, body and tail phase relationship. So let's maybe use like an old-school cymbal

[Music] transient, maybe something a bit more modern [Music]. But yeah, you can kind of see how this

can be super useful. Um, I mean, it doesn't replace anything that you can't really do in the timeline, but workflows

everything. And I think when you have so much, um, you know, stuff like drums, you're probably going to be making so many of

these that it's cool to have different ways of, you know, overlapping them, crossfading them, shifting the phase, that

kind of thing. When it's just so simply done like that in a plugin, it's super nice. Okay, so now we're on to the slightly

more experimental portion of the video. Okay, so the next thing that I want to talk about is Filterverse, which is just

a filter, but there's a couple of features in Filterverse which kind of allow you to take it from just a filter

into more synthesis territory, right? So I mean, of course, we have the resonance which allows us to, uh, you know,

If we're passing audio through, we can create self-resonant filters, but we have this oscillator over here

which you can use as a kind of modulation source, but the oscillator has an audio output. So if we set up

something like an ADSR, turn the attack down and the sustain down, what we can do is we can get this to trigger the

oscillator's audio; so we can get it to just a sharp kind of transient like

this. We can also use another ADSR to modulate the pitch of this oscillator, so velocity sensitivity will

change the amount of modulation that gets sent through. So if you just want the same pitch every time, you can turn

that velocity sensitivity off. Cool. So now what we can do is we can make use of—once we have this kind of audio

being generated as a transient—now we can make use of the resonant capabilities of the filters to kind of

create a tone [Music]. Right, so what we can do is we can use one of these ADSRs to trigger the

resonance, and then we can dry/wet change the dry/wet. So basically what we're doing here is the one oscillator—like the

My TOP 5 Drum Sound Design Plugins

My TOP 5 Drum Sound Design Plugins