Note: I had to post this review in two parts because of the number of embedded media links. Sorry for the inconvenience.

THE TASK

I decided to give this new tool from Nomad Factory a quick run. Instead of going through the technical talk that I'm sure I won't get right, I wanted to put this plug-in up to its paces and include samples of my tests for you to evaluate. For this test, I'm using a snippet of a drum take gone wrong. This gives us a fair chance to see how much juice we can get out this plug-in. BTW, I only used Drum Tools on every drum channel except for HorNet VU Meter set at auto gain at -18dB to ensure proper gain staging. Although the drums were recorded at reasonable gain and Drum Tools is designed to handle any hot signal, it is a matter of habit to do so. Finally, on the mix bus I added dither to bounce the files to mp3. The settings I used are saved as presets that you can download here.



THE TEST - PART 1

This is a quick balance of the drum kit without any processing:



Let's now inspect each of the tracks and see what I have done with them.

On the kick drum the improvement is amazing. Drum Tools adds a great "thud" that the recoding was laking. There was plenty of room to continue sculpting the sound. Mine was just a quick redo of the drum sound. Here you are with the unprocessed and processed kick drum tracks:




Here are the snare drums, unprocessed and processed:




The kick and snare were highly improved by Drum Tools. Hey, this is expected right? Well, I didn't really expect much in the way of salvaging the toms.

Tom 1 had a horrible overtone, really annoying. The fix was to gate it till it became barely audible, and then complement the sound with one of the reverbs to give it back some tail:




Tom 2 has a dead sound that was worsened by the rattling produced by the mic cable touching the drum. The workaround was similar to the process for tom 1:




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Go to part 2.
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Last edited: Mar 15, 2016

Thanks for the nice review.

Nomad has always been a house that makes great and intuitive interfaces, but for some reason, it always sounded "harsh" to me.

 

i agree with you. Nomad plugs can be a little harsh to my ears, too. However, my test was on drums that anyone would have discarded in the first place. Drum Tools on great sounding tracks and used in moderation (especially with the high end), might be very useful. I'll keep testing this thing.