Acon Digital Drum Production Suite

DeBleed:Drums — a more powerful alternative to a traditional gate/expander for controlling bleed.

Need to rebalance a stereo drum loop? Too much bleed on your close mics? This pair of plug‑ins could be just the ticket...

Acon Digital are one of those rare companies who actually deserve more hype! I use several of their de‑noise and restoration tools, and they often crack problems I can’t seem to address any other way.

Their new Drum Production Suite comprises two plug‑ins, DeBleed:Drums and Remix:Drums. It’s available for Mac and Windows hosts of AU, AAX, VST2.4 or VST3 plug‑ins. Activation is simple: just copy and paste a licence key. The same machine‑learning technology underpins both plug‑ins, but they have different aims. DeBleed:Drums is for use on an acoustic kit’s close mics, while Remix:Drums aims to separate out or rebalance the individual kit pieces in mixed stereo drums.

Do I Not Bleed?

DeBleed:Drums does something similar to some other intelligent drum gates I’ve used, and while it perhaps offers less control over the result than Sonnox’s Drum Gate, it can be used for more than kick, snare and toms. A Drum Type selector specifies the mic you’re processing: Kick, Snare, Hi‑Hats, Cymbals or Toms. The plug‑in identifies those sounds, separates them internally from the bleed in real time, and provides a few controls to refine the result.

A Floor knob sets how far the bleed is turned down (up to ‑60dB), while Sensitivity determines which parts of the signal are treated as the wanted drum and which as bleed. Acon suggest starting with the latter at zero, increasing/decreasing only if necessary, and I’d agree that’s the best approach. Finally, Trigger Threshold will feel familiar to anyone who’s used a gate. Found to the left of a scrolling waveform‑plus‑bleed‑reduction history, this fader’s scale aligns with the waveform, making it easy to set; the higher the Threshold, the stronger the de‑bleeding, but the greater the risk of missing wanted hits. On the right are real‑time bleed‑reduction and output‑level meters. At the top, preset management is joined by undo/redo and A/B comparison buttons, and basic settings options. In the freely resizeable GUI, the controls and labels remain unchanged but the history display and meters scale to fit.

Testing DeBleed:Drums on acoustic drum multitracks in various styles, I found it very effective on kick and snare close mics. Not only did it almost always successfully identify the relevant hits, but choosing a suitable preset almost always did a decent job of cleaning them up, so that I could then process the close mics without worrying about the effect on the other mics.

There were just a few issues to contend with. For instance, on some faster, busier parts, with a resonant kick and lots of tom hits in the bleed, an occasional loud floor tom was identified as a kick. You don’t have the learn/remove functions of Drum Gate here to control that, but I was still able to correct these anomalies by adjusting the Trigger Threshold. Also worth noting is that it struggled to tame bleed from sources other than drums; for example, it...