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 didn’t manage to remove the belted‑out lead vocal in an all‑in‑one‑take rock‑band recording.

It was a similar story with snare. Again, it delivered impressive bleed control, and it wasn’t difficult to tackle detection errors by adjusting the Trigger Threshold, though I did find that the result more often benefited from a small Sensitivity tweak. I sometimes wished for gate‑ or envelope‑style control over the release, to prevent the click of a kick or hi‑hat creeping through after a snare. But the results were good enough that I could insert other processors after DeBleed to refine the result.

Speaking of adding plug‑ins, slapping an 1176 emulation on a post‑DeBleed snare and compressing the signal assertively with a fast attack and release instantly rewarded me with a nice fat‑and‑firm ‘snare body’ sound with which I could beef up the main snare sound in the overheads. I was delighted that I could EQ for more of the snap or meat without lifting up any ugliness in the cymbals. Definitely better results than I could achieve with traditional processing, and better than with some other ‘smart’ gates I’ve used too.

With toms, DeBleed:Drums worked reasonably well, but its success was more dependent on the performance style and what else was being played, meaning I encountered more challenges. Experiments on hi‑hat and cymbal spot mics met with, frankly, surprising success. I could even fake hat and cymbal spot mics from the overheads, and automate them to shift the energy in a drum performance at different points in a song, still leaving the overheads and room sounding ‘natural’. That’s handy!

Unpick The Mix?

Remix:Drums is similarly intuitive. You have a channel each for the drums I listed for DeBleed:Drums, plus Other, which is where signal not recognised as a specific drum is routed. The faders, each with a bar meter, range from ‑45 to +10 dB, so there’s plenty of scope to rebalance the drum mix. Beneath are channel mute and solo buttons, a pan slider and a Sensitivity knob. Most of that should be self‑explanatory, and the last is pretty much the same as on DeBleed:Drums: turn one way for more isolation, the other for less.

Remix:Drums. Want to turn down the hi‑hat or that booming electro kick? No problem!

Slap this plug‑in on a stereo drum loop, quickly solo one fader at a time, and you’ll get a good idea of what it offers. No stem separator I’ve used can (yet) perfectly unscramble the egg, and Remix:Drums is no exception. But given that this is a real‑time insert plug‑in, I have to say that what it does is remarkable. I could, with exceptional ease and speed, extract kicks and snares of a quality that allowed me to process and use them in a mix, particularly when using them in parallel with the original loop.

I could ride the hats up/down by 6‑8 dB and still be happy with the result.

For the other parts of the kit, the quality of isolation depends on the track you’re working on: it can be great or less so! Notably, on some acoustic styles (it can handle electronic drums) with lots of metalwork, there was a slightly ‘seasick compression’ effect on the isolated hi‑hats and cymbals, almost as if they were being ‘ducked’ by the kick and snare. Again, I couldn’t completely remove vocal spill in the overheads. But although such artefacts mean I might not want to completely isolate the hats for separate use, the separation was good enough that I could ride the hats up/down by 6‑8 dB and still be happy with the result. I simply could not accomplish that with conventional processors.

The performance on toms depended very much on the part in question, in terms of the tom sounds themselves, the way they were played, and in how ‘boomy’ or ‘ringy’ the kick was. Sometimes, some of the kick sustain was assigned to the toms, for example, particularly where the kick and tom were struck simultaneously. Similarly, I sometimes had difficulty separating out drums hit at the same time: kicks and claps, snare and tambourine... But despite specific issues like this, on lots of material I enjoyed clean separation and it worked very well.

Acon tell me that when turning up the Sensitivity control to achieve greater isolation of a specific drum, the ‘remainder’ should appear in the Other channel; this way, the channels all sum to recreate the source signal perfectly. And, indeed, when all channels play together with the faders at unity, they sum perfectly. However, my tests suggested there was more to it — that several discrete drum‑isolation processes are performed in series. For instance, with Snare and Other soloed, changing the Snare Sensitivity results in changes to the mix of the two sounds, while tweaking it with all channels playing doesn’t change the mix. Acon confirmed that my understanding was correct.

Separate Outputs

There’s another powerful option, supported by several DAWs, that opens up a universe of creative potential. Remix:Drums can provide separate outputs for each channel as well as the stereo mix, so you can route each kit piece to a different DAW track. It was a little fiddly to set up in Reaper (a Reaper issue, not a Remix:Drums one), but once done it worked flawlessly. It was wonderful to be able to deploy all my usual drum processors on these parts, particularly for parallel treatments, which were super easy to create this way — just keep the main Remix:Drums routed to your master bus, and route the individual parts to your DAW tracks for processing.

In this way, I could add a dedicated plate reverb to a dry‑sounding snare, and EQ and compress the reverb to make it fit the original loop. Wonderful! Similarly, the kick and snare isolation is good enough that I could use parallel saturation and compression to really shift up the energy in some loops without crushing the life out of it. A great option for remixing.

More generally (even without the DAW routing stuff) Remix:Drums is a great way to re‑voice those ‘almost but not quite’ samples to better suit a composition or to fit them into a mix. You can pull down the metalwork or tuck in an overblown kick really easily. Or you might use the solo/mute buttons to extract, say, just the kick and snare groove from a sample. Even the faders alone could be a really handy tool for rebalancing the drums in a live recording where all you could use were the FOH mics.

Remix:Drums is a great way to re‑voice those ‘almost but not quite’ samples to better suit a composition or to fit them into a mix.

Ba‑dum Tish!

I realise that I’ve identified some limitations, but I have to say that my overriding impression of Acon Digital’s Drum Production Suite is very positive, and both plug‑ins are truly impressive. They’re particularly good at isolating kicks and snares, but they open up countless possibilities for manipulating other kit pieces and whole loops too. Remix:Drums should appeal to anyone working with loops, remixes or even DJ sets. I do more work with acoustic kits and mixing, and for me, DeBleed:Drums has been a revelation. It goes way beyond what traditional tools can achieve, and works better than some other ‘smart gates’ I’ve used. There remain strong arguments for embracing bleed when miking [check out our 'Working With Mic Bleed' workshop for explanations], but when I want to turn it down, this is the tool I’ll now reach for first.