The MDrumLeveler from MeldaProductions is a plug-in designed for improving drum performances by stabilizing drum hit levels, removing leakage and ambience, and providing control over individual drum hits. A traditional dynamics processor detects levels of input samples and transforms them depending on a transfer curve that can result in gain changing on every sample. This is useful in shaping the sound itself, but makes it hard to be transparent when wanting to level individual drum hits.

The software detects events (drum hits for example) and transforms the level of each event without altering the sound or color, resulting in excellent transparency. The plug-in also removes leakage and ambience and provides drum envelope shaping. The software’s event detector is adjustable and along with other settings, provides two parallel resonant band-pass filters to target the dominant frequencies of a particular drum sound.

A 20 ms look ahead limiter provides 100% accuracy for standard drums, but for live situations that can be narrowed down to 5 ms while still delivering acceptable results.