Mixer, Inserts, Reverbs
All the tools you need!
Addictive Drums provides all the mixing possibilities, inserts and effects you need to produce proffessional drum tracks for your music. And in one place! The mixer is located on the kit page, the inserts on the edit page and the reverbs on the effects page. This enables a workflow that is hard to find anywhere else.
In Addictive Drums its really easy to re-tune the snare, make it more or less ringy, adjust the mic balance, etc to fit the vocal. The inbuilt mixer, eqs and compressors are so good you can leave the drums just in a stereo track of your DAW if you want.
The Mixer
The mixer is a very powerful tool when shaping your drum sound. It gives you full control over all audio channels in Addictive Drums. Make your drumkit sound big by turning up the room mic levels or make it tighter by soloing the close mics for example. All in all there are 12 channels in the mixer, 8 mono channels for the individual kit pieces and 4 stereo channels for the over head mics, room mics, bus and the master. All the channels can be adjusted in panning from left to right and you can easily bypass the inserts and sends or activate mono or solo listening.
Inserts
Video: Inserts & Effects
The inserts are all located on the edit page in Addictive Drums. The inserts consist of compression, distortion, EQ, tape and limiter. You can use the inserts on all the channels and kitpieces. Add distortion and compression to the over head channel for example while you turn up the bass on the kick drum with the EQ. Altering and editing the sound is fast and flexible and you get results fast. The inserts and kitpieces are not connected so you can switch any kit piece at any time and the inserts settings will remain.
Compressor
Addictive Drums compressor is powerful yet easy to use. The advanced auto gain function ensures you that you always get a good listening level. With high compression and a slow attack you can easily get hard hitting snares. A quick attack and medium long release works great for bus-compression while a faster release and attack can give you nasty pumping compression.
Distortion
All in all there are four different distortion types in Addictive Drums. Heavy and Crunch are more natural sounding distortions while Zap and BitCrush have their own unique sounds. The distortion amount can be set for each of the distortion types and you can also set a mixing level to adjust how much of the clean signal you want to mix with the distorted sound. By adjusting the filter you can also distort a given frequency range.
EQ
Three bands to rule them all - The EQ section consists of three peak/bell filters ranging from -24dB to +24dB with adjustable Q value. The EQ also has some smart features for easy editing. Using the mousewheel adjusts the Q while holding shift gives you higher precision.
It really made creating good drum sounds easy even for a novice like me. I found that by having the effects built into the vsti and editing default presets I was able to create a drum sound I was happy with
Tape / Filter (on Master & Bus channels)
The Bus and Master channels in Addictive Drums are equipped with a couple of extra insert effects. Tape emulates the warm sound of a vintage analog tape unit with saturation and bass enhancement controls. The filter allows you to cut bass or treble after the insert effects to clean up the low end or go for a softer sound with less high frequencies.
Saturating Limiter
Each channel in Addictive Drums also features a saturating the limiter. The limiter can be used to squash peaks or to give individual drums or any of the buses an overall soft distortion.
Reverbs
Addictive Drums has two reverbs. You can select from four different room types, also known as algorithms. Ambience is a short reverb type that gives you a wider sound without a long tail. Room is a medium sized room with a longer decay while Hall is a big room that allows for a really long tail of up to ten seconds. Plate emulates an analog plate reverb with its unique diffuse sound. All reverb types can be adjusted in pre delay, decay and damping. By using both reverbs you can mix two reverb types to create completely new rooms. Try using an ambience reverb and mix in a hint some plate reverb with a long tail.
Video: Reverbs
Reverbs Video
This video shows you the sounds you can get from the reverbs in Addictive Drums. As you can see, switching from one reverb type to another happends instantly and you can hear the difference immidiatly.