Whether you’re looking to swap out a badly recorded kit, get creative with your percussive layering, or capture a ruthlessly consistent modern metal sound, a drum replacement plugin gives you the means by which to do it, triggering new sounds from existing ones for total substitution or judicious mixing in. Here are five of the best, each one coming at the titular concept from its own unique angle.

WaveMachine Labs Drumagog

The original drum replacement plugin, Drumagog has been rescuing tepid beats for over 20 years now. The current iteration – Drumagog 5 – launched in 2010, and is available in Pro and Platinum versions, the pricier latter bolstering the core feature set with the highly desirable Hi-Hat Tracking (distinguishing between closed, half-open and open hats) and plugin hosting (expanding replacement from just samples to VST instruments), as well as the less compelling Convolution Reverb and Morph|Engine (weird tonal effects). Beyond that, Drumagog offers flawlessly tight and accurate tracking, trigger filtering and bleed reduction, single or multi-sample replacement, smart phase alignment, a simple onboard synth for layering, automatic ducking (great for clearing out overheads), and much more. Although the workflow and UI are showing their age in places, WaveMachine Labs’ labour of love really delivers where it counts: the supremely precise triggering of new drum sounds from old for seamless replacement or overlaying

Toontrack Superior Drummer 3

Although we wouldn’t imagine many producers invest in Toontrack’s pack-leading virtual drums/drummer system solely for its Tracker replacement function, as ‘added extras’ go, it’s an absolute belter, integrating perfectly with the rest of the plugin to enable total control over every aspect of your drum tracks. Unlike its rivals, the Tracker is an ‘offline’ solution, requiring parts to be imported and played back within the plugin, rather than analysing live input in real time (it is an instrument, not an effect, after all). The benefits of this are that the machine learning algorithm behind the whole thing can automatically identify kicks, snares, hats, toms and cymbals, making the workflow wonderfully quick and intuitive, and that everything is presented as MIDI, for export to the Song Track or your DAW. And while most other replacement plugins include their own sample libraries with which to override your source tracks, Superior Drummer 3, of course, boasts one of, if not the, most comprehensive, detailed and beautifully recorded repositories of massively multisampled drum kits ever created, as well as the ability to fly in sampled hits from elsewhere, all within a ridiculously powerful editing and mixing system. Amazing stuff.

XLN Audio Addictive Trigger

With Superior Drummer 3 deploying machine learning for the identification of drum and cymbal types offline, XLN Audio’s more dedicated replacement plugin aims to offer the same degree of discernment in real time, thanks to their proprietary FFT-based ‘Audio Fingerprint’ analysis algorithm. Individual drums can be ‘fingerprinted’ manually, or automatically via the Super Start function, which sets up every aspect of the detection profile for you after a few seconds of input. A small but well formed onboard sound library provides a decent variety of replacement samples, and if you also have Addictive Drums 2 installed, all of its content will be available as well. There’s no sample import, however, so you’ll need to export your detected hits as MIDI to use them with other sources.

Plenty of shaping and mixing is built in (dynamics, EQ, saturation, volume envelope, effects, etc), too, and as well as impressing with its superb detection accuracy, just like its Addictive Drums and Keys stablemates, Addictive Trigger is quick, easy and fun to work with.

Slate Digital Trigger 2

Another venerable industry favourite, Trigger was an instant, ahem, hit upon its release in 2010, with v2 improving on the original in several regards a few years later. Simplicity is one of the main draws here: Trigger 2 is intended for the straightforward replacement or augmentation of individual kit pieces (ie, single tracks from multitrack recordings) with up to eight velocity-mapped and/or stacked samples, prioritising triggering accuracy and dynamic layering over sound editing, of which there’s basically none, apart from a handy transient-triggered gate. Trigger 2’s Leakage suppression setup is a highlight, taking an analytical feed from the source of the leaking signal into one of the plugin’s two inputs to ensure great results; and if the fantastic bundled sample library doesn’t get your kit where you want it, you can import and layer up your own using the Trigger Instrument Editor. MIDI triggering and export are also catered to, broadening the remit somewhat, but the big selling points of Trigger 2 are its ease of use, lack of frills and exemplary triggering, and the exceptional quality of that library.

UVI Drum Replacer

The newest kid on the drum replacement block, UVI’s contender calls on machine learning to intelligently analyse and separate the input signal into five energy-based primary components, plus bleed and background noise (the ‘Remainder’ component), thereby affording an extraordinary degree of control over trigger shaping and filtering. The resulting triggers are sent to an eight-layer playback engine, each layer of which can house a sample or a VST instrument, and the layers can be velocity-mapped, or triggered simultaneously, in sequence or randomly. Samples can be tuned, envelope-shaped and reversed in place, and every layer has a Delay parameter for offsetting and ‘smearing’ (particularly useful for big snare/clap combos). The interface is slick and straightforward to navigate, and although, surprisingly, there are no sounds included at all, the integrated browser at least makes it easy to access those in your own library.

Crucially, Drum Replacer’s futuristic spectral separation technology and layering scheme work brilliantly, making it a thoroughly viable – albeit barren, content-wise – contender for your triggering attention.

Is there a place for drum replacement in your music production workflow, and if so, what’s your weapon of choice? Let us know in the comments.