Did This Plugin Just Make Drum Sample Replacement Obsolete?

As I’m sure you’re well aware, Glenn Fricker hates drum replacement. He thinks of it as a weak cop-out for bad drummers and wimpy engineers to claim someone else’s sound as their own. I personally disagree to an extent, and I’ll be going more into that in the future, but I do think its overuse is widespread. Many lazy engineers use them instead of getting great source tones, replacing their own sounds altogether rather than blending them for greater impact while retaining a natural sound.

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Well, Glenn seems to think that those days are behind us, and now we can have our cake and eat it too with the Drum Leveler from SoundRadix. It’s more than a compressor or limiter – it analyzes the waveform and contours all the hits to be whatever level you desire and is supposedly extremely transparent. It also includes a number of other built-in features such as a gate and sidechain to make it your all-in-one drum dynamics processing plug-in.

If you’re as curious as I am about whether or not these claims are accurate, check out this video for the evidence:

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As Editor-in-Chief of Gear Gods, I've been feeding your sick instrument fetishism and trying unsuccessfully to hide my own since 2013. I studied music on both coasts (Berklee and SSU) and now I'm just trying to put my degree to some use. That's a music degree, not an English one. I'm sure you noticed.

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