Article Preview - Wavemachinelabs Drumagog 4 Platinum

Wavemachinelabs' Drumagog has matured considerably since Martin Walker's review in SOS February 2003 (), not least because it can now communicate directly with Fxpansion's virtual drum software, BFD. It also now comes in VST, AU and RTAS formats, which replace the ageing Direct X version. It is Drumagog Platinum 4.1.0 that's reviewed here, while Drumagog Basic, Drumagog Pro and Drumagog BFD cost less and offer different, restricted feature sets (there's a comparison chart showing the differences at ).

Drum replacement is a common technique in music production, whether it be to tweak near-perfect recordings, to replace drums outright, or to layer new sounds with the existing ones. Many heavy metal styles use drum replacement as a matter of course, and it's quite a common practice on live recordings (including for very big-name bands that I can't name here!) to take beats from one part of a performance, or another night on the same tour, and use them to 'reinforce' the sound that's destined for, say, a tour DVD. If done well, it's both inobtrusive and effective.

Whereas some drum-replacement software works off-line, Drumagog is a real-time plug-in: you insert it on the DAW mixer channel of the drum sound you want to replace, select the replacement sound, set the trigger threshold and sensitivity, and you'll start to hear your new samples triggered pretty much in time with the original. There are then several controls you can tweak to improve the triggering and the sound of the triggered sample to make it appear more or less natural.

The GUI comprises three tabs: Main, Samples, and Advanced. As the name implies, Main is where you do most of the work, including setting the trigger threshold, sensitivity and resolution, shaping the trigger side-chain signal with a filter, selecting the sound to be triggered, adjusting the wet/dry mix of incoming audio and triggered sound, and matching the pitch of the sample to the source. For setting the threshold, I find it much easier to use the Visual Mode, which switches the entire display to show the amplitude of input waveforms against the threshold level. Other features accessible on the Main page include Dynamic, Random and Positional Multisamples. These, respectively, allow Drumagog to respond to the power of the original drum hits, to avoid continuously repeating the same sample, and to determine which part of the drum piece has been hit, such as a snare rim instead of the head, and reflect this in its choice of sample. Some GOG-format libraries support alternating left- and right-hand hits when triggering at a certain speed,...