Harrison have released AVA Drum Flow, a toolkit for drums with everything you need to make polished drum recordings. We have the details.

True story: I used to teach recording at a college. A student was talking to his friend about a classic rock track he’d heard and was saying how impressed he was with the drum sounds. I overheard him say “I didn’t even know they had drum replacement in the 70’s”…

It brought home to me that for many people, the way to get good drum sounds is to use someone else’s drums. As someone who believes recording drums is the best part of a tracking session this is a bit depressing, but I do understand why so many people like drum replacement and drum VIs - because they sound amazing!

However if you want a unique drum sound you can't get there by replacing all your drums with the same old samples!  Working with real drums is a challenge because every drum, drummer, and room requires a different approach.

AVA Drum Flow

AVA Drum Flow is a channel strip plugin designed for mixing drums. It contains 6 routable processing elements and a master section with input, output, and routing controls.

The elements included are:

• Drum Character: A unique equaliser that detects drum hit transients and allows for the attack and tail sections of the envelope to be EQed individually.

• Expander/Gate: A versatile dynamics processor that can be used as either an expander or gate to tighten your drum sounds and remove bleed from other nearby drum mics.

• Signal Generator: Enhance your drum sounds with extra 'snap' or 'thump' by blending-in a gated noise or low-frequency tone. 

• Compressor: Harrison's full-featured console compressor with Ratio, Attack, Release, and Makeup controls.

• 32C Channel EQ: An emulation of Harrison’s well known 32C channel strip EQ.

• Filters: High- and low- pass filters with selectable shapes.

AVA Drum Flow is available for Windows, macOS and Linux in AAX, VST, VST3 and AU formats at a cost of £158