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DrumEQ

DrumEQ is a static/dynamic EQ who’s frequency centers are set to octave multiples of the resonant frequency of the drum. A secondary, “Alternate Resonance” can also be added to subtly or drastically change the character of the drum as well.

How often when looking at old mixes, do you find that the cuts and boosts on your drum eq’s are centered around multiples of the drum’s resonant frequency? Perhaps this realization has led to you always keeping a calculator app open?

At AIXDSP, we don’t just want to get rid of unnecessary mouse-clicks, but unnecessary calculators as well!

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* All plugins are 64 bit unless otherwise noted

Loop a section of the drum in question and turn the “Tune Frequency” knob until the blue vertical line on the spectrum window lines up with the fundamental resonant frequency of the drum. You will see that all of the EQ frequency centers have now changed to octaves of that new “Tune Frequency”. In many if not most cases, you will also see that the drum itself has some strong peaks or dips that those frequencies. Try cutting and boosting at these different octaves and rejoice in not having to fiddle around with calculators, fine tuning and direct entries just to get the frequencies right. Got it wrong? No problem, turning the “Tune Frequency” knob automatically adjusts all bands across all octaves! Set the “Alternate Resonance” knob above or below the fundamental frequency of the drum (think of this very much in terms of how you tune your tom’s bottom head compared to the top head). Turning up or down these band gains can have a very strong impact on the “harshness” or “smoothness” of the drum sound in total. You may have long ago noticed a phenomenon whereby turning up the gain on octaves above the fundamental often sounds extremely similar to turning up the fundamental itself.
 
This has enormous uses:
  1. You can definitely trick the ear into thinking that small speakers are putting out a LOT more lows because of this trick. Experiment with this sort of thing if you haven’t before. Its amazing just how much low bass it feels like the sound has even through an iPhone speaker\

  2. Because of the property above, you can carve out space in a mix by moving what seems to be the resonant octave up an octave or so, the classic case of making room for the bass guitar by moving the kick up.

  3. And all this is before we get into the compressor/expander on every band, including a hold control!

Drum specific EQ and dynamics processor with bands centered on the harmonics of the drum.

Problem: Often the frequencies that need to be addressed when mixing drums or harmonics related to the shells to the drum shells resonant frequency. An easy way to manipulate each of these harmonics can go a long way, you’re not just mixing but in altering the perceived base response of a song. Many times drums appear to have more bass than the phone speaker or headphone cadet ever pulled out through the illusion caused by turning up or down a harmonic that actually exists in that speaker’s band pass range.

Previous solutions: Google up a frequency response chart and a calculator and start entering in all your values and then type all of these values into a parametric equalizer plugin. No fun! Oops, you got the fundamental frequency wrong, now you have to do all of the calculations and typing in parameters again. Triple no fun!

Our Solution: with Drum EQ you first set the drums resonant frequency and all of the harmonics are calculated for you and mapped onto the other bands in addition there’s a secondary harmonic setting so that you can emulator effect of the bottom head some degree or are creating a more angry snare or a mellow snare. Also each band of DrumEQ features a set of dynamics so that you can have some control over the dynamic range of the queued signal a lot of times you’re gonna see that you’re gonna want to limit things after you boost them a little bit.

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