WaveMachineLabs Drumagog 6 Platinum (Download)

Finding the hits is the hard part.

A ghost note can hide under the ring of the stroke before it. And a snare mic usually picks up plenty of kick. Those are the spots where drum replacement tends to fall apart. Engineers often end up adding the triggers in by hand.

Drumagog 6 draws every hit it finds as a marker on the waveform. Drag the THRESHOLD line down and the quiet ghost notes appear while you drag. When the kick keeps triggering the snare, you can clear all of those false hits with a click of the REMOVE SIMILAR button.

In Kit mode Drumagog can automatically trigger off each separate drum inside of a stereo drum track.

Live

Use Live mode when a drummer needs to hear the new sound right away, in the studio or on stage. It fires each sample the moment the drum crosses the THRESHOLD line. The delay is about 2 ms, too short for a drummer to notice.

Drum

For mixing a snare or kick close mic, Drum mode is the everyday choice. Looking 80 ms ahead lets it judge each hit more carefully. It also keeps a timeline of every hit for you to check and fix afterward.

Kit Platinum

Put one copy of Drumagog on the drum bus and Kit mode replaces the whole kit. Each drum shows up as a lane on the TRIGGER page and as a strip on the MIX page.

Move any hit Drumagog found.

The height of each marker shows how hard that hit was played. Drag a marker sideways to move the hit, or up and down to make it harder or softer. If Drumagog missed a hit, double-click the waveform where it belongs.

And there’s also a powerful new tool – Drumagog now lets you click on a detected trigger and tell it to remove all other drum hits that sound similar to it. Or to only keep hits that sound like it and delete the rest.

The two buttons are REMOVE SIMILAR and KEEP SIMILAR. Whatever they take out, one undo brings back.

Drumagog will find you a snare that sounds like your original.

Play the song through once and Drumagog measures the drum on your track. Every GOG in your library is then sorted by how close it sounds, with a percentage on each row. The same collection appears as a map on the LIBRARY page. Hover over a dot there to hear that GOG.

To narrow the list further, click one of the six tags for that kind of drum, such as CRACK or FAT for a snare. The tags come from measuring the sound.

Every drum gets its own channel strip.

On the MIX page there are two independent channel strips – one for tweaking the sound before Drumagog triggers on it, and one for after. The PRE-TRIGGER page cleans up the drum before Drumagog listens for hits. A low cut on the snare’s EQ, for example, can stop the kick from setting it off.

The POST-TRIGGER page is where you mix. There each drum has an EQ, a transient shaper, a convolution reverb and a synth layer. Pan, the fader, mute and PHASE sit below them. Every display shows the real signal as it plays.

The gate, the transient shaper and the reverb come with Platinum. Pro’s strips hold the EQ and the synth layer.

The MIDI page is a full piano roll.

Every note on the piano roll is one of the hits Drumagog found. Editing the notes works the way it does in your DAW, with one undo history shared with the TRIGGER page.

The quickest way into your DAW is to drag the whole take out as a MIDI clip. Drumagog also sends every note out of the plug-in’s MIDI output. For DAWs that can’t record that output, Logic among them, a virtual MIDI port shows up as a device any DAW can record from. Ready-made note maps cover General MIDI and Toontrack’s Superior Drummer and EZdrummer.

Build your own GOGs.

Drop a folder of samples onto the window and Drumagog builds a GOG from them. It measures how hard each sample was hit and sorts them from soft to loud. As each one comes in, Drumagog trims it to start right at the attack.

To add more, click ADD FROM AUDIO in the GOG editor. Choose an audio file and Drumagog adds every hit it finds there as a sample of its own. You can also play your song and let Drumagog capture the hits straight from the track.

The GOG editor lets you move samples between dynamic groups and add room mics and articulations. Double-click any sample to trim it, fade it or change its level. Once you save the GOG, it joins your library and shows up in the ranked list.