Compression is the tool we first think of when it comes to level control. They have been around a long time and although these days they are seen as tools to use to introduce colour and shape sounds creatively, the aim of most designers of hardware compressors has been to make a transparent compressor with as few artefacts as possible.

DAW workflows allow processing that simply isn’t possible in the analogue domain and Drum Levelers like the excellent Sound Radix Drum Leveler offer forensic control over percussive sounds free from the compression artefacts which are a necessary consequence of compression based on the instantaneous level of a signal.

In this free video tutorial, Julian Rodgers demonstrates how instead of using a compressor to even out slightly uneven snares, uses a leveller, which instead of responding the instantaneous level relative to the threshold, treats each “hit” as a discrete event and scales the level of the hit up or down relative to the target level, which results in fewer timbral changes being introduced, even in an example with only slight inconsistencies in the playing as in the example.

To demonstrate this Julian uses the Drum Leveller section of the Sonnox Oxford Drum Gate, a section of this plug-in, which is easy to overlook as the remarkable AI gating it is principally designed for, is the stand out feature, even with relatively few controls, this simple leveller is enough to get cleaner, more transparent results than the already very transparent Oxford Dynamics plug-in used to demonstrate the same process achieved using conventional compression.