Drumclone - extract and clone percussive sounds

Tutorial | Oct 14, 2024

In today's video, I introduced Drum Clone, a new free plugin designed for extracting and re-synthesizing percussive sounds from tracks with multiple instruments, which is particularly useful for drum and bass producers like me working with classic breakbeats. I demonstrated how to create a new track with Drum Clone, how it effectively isolates kick drums, and discussed its potential for future models focused on snare drums and hi-hats. Overall, I find it to be a handy tool worth considering, especially if more models are introduced, and I wouldn't mind paying for additional features.

You can watch the Video on Youtube

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• Drumclone Website

Summary #

Maybe you don't watch the video, here are some important takeaways:

In the video, I introduce a new software called Drum Clone, which is a free percussive signal extraction and re-synthesis plugin designed for drum sound design and music production. The tool is aimed at extracting percussive sounds, such as kick drums and snares, from tracks that are surrounded by a variety of other instruments. This kind of functionality is particularly useful for producers working with genres like drum and bass, especially when dealing with classic breakbeats. Often in such scenarios, the goal is to isolate specific sounds while removing bass or other surrounding tones for detailed sound analysis and design.

The plugin is still in its beta phase and is developed using JUCE, a popular framework for audio plug-ins. When using Drum Clone, you begin by creating a new track with the plugin loaded. You can then add an audio file to the plugin's interface, and though you can't select parts by clicking and dragging within the display, you can move markers to define the segment of the track you wish to work on.

Once the area containing a percussive element, like a kick drum, is defined, Drum Clone extracts and displays the waveform of the isolated sound at the bottom of the interface. I demonstrate this with a track containing a kick drum, showing how the plugin manages to extract the kick cleanly, despite the presence of other noises. The extracted sound retains some of the original noise from its attack phase, which, in my opinion, makes the result quite impressive.

The plugin offers several adjustable controls such as "Recover," allowing users to mix the re-synthesized and extracted signals to retain some character from the original sound, and "Noise," which controls the amount of noise to recover. Although the plugin doesn’t use artificial intelligence, it simplifies the process of isolating percussive elements significantly.

Currently, Drum Clone has a kick drum model, but I express hope for future models that can handle snares and other percussion sounds, enhancing its utility. I find the approach different from other plugins like Kick 3 or Kick Ninja, which deal primarily with synthesizing frequencies. Drum Clone allows detailed fine-tuning of the sound, offering a useful tool for producing clean kick samples that can be easily implemented into new tracks.

I also demonstrate the plugin's ability to handle a dense, compressed track, extracting the kick drum despite the audio complexity. After extraction, the resulting isolated sound can be saved or dragged out for use in other projects. Drum Clone’s potential to be expanded with additional models makes it a valuable tool, to the point where I’d be willing to pay for it, especially given my frequent need to isolate percussive sounds.

In conclusion, I recommend trying out Drum Clone, providing a link for download in the video description, and I thank the viewers for their engagement, encouraging them to leave comments, likes, and subscriptions.

Transcription #

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by AI, so it might not be perfect. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.
You can also click on the timestamps to jump to the right part of the video, which should be helpful.

[00:00:00] hey folks welcome back today it's about drum clone a new percussive signal extraction and
[00:00:06] re-synthesis software for drum sound design and music production so that's the name that's
[00:00:11] what it says on the web page here and this plugin is completely free at the moment and it tries to
[00:00:17] extract percussive sounds out of songs or tracks surrounded by a lot of different instruments and
[00:00:24] that's something you need to do sometimes for let's say if you produce drum bass like me
[00:00:31] you work with sometimes with a lot of classic breakbeats and you want to extract certain sounds
[00:00:37] and you want to disable some of the bass or surrounding bass sounds and you want to analyze
[00:00:43] the kick drum and so on so this becomes pretty handy here because it tries to nail this process of
[00:00:49] singling out percussive sounds and i think that's the first plugin that goes in that direction
[00:00:56] maybe i'm wrong let me know in the comments if there are other plugins trying to do this
[00:01:00] i haven't actually read too much into this here but i tried it out and i want to show you how this works
[00:01:06] so um there's a free download here i put the link in the description below so you can try it out for
[00:01:12] yourself so here we want to create one new track with a drum clone on it and we can resize this here it's
[00:01:22] made with juice nice it's already in beta here so we can just click here and open up a new audio file we can
[00:01:30] also uh maybe yeah this is okay i just drag this in and here we have now the full track in the upper
[00:01:43] display here and you can't actually select something here by clicking and dragging maybe there is something
[00:01:51] like this already but i haven't found it so you need to uh just move here these markers to the beginning of the track
[00:02:07] i don't know where here kick drum is probably here
[00:02:10] this should be this probably here the first kick drum
[00:02:17] yeah
[00:02:19] let's try and single out here the kick drum
[00:02:26] so this is the kick drum right then there's a bass and this is here then the snare drum
[00:02:36] and you can see down here we have already the extracted waveform that's the kick drum
[00:02:42] so this is how it sounds in the track and this is how it sounds extracted
[00:02:48] pretty clean in my opinion and it kind of works because it has all the noise in it from the attack
[00:02:58] sound here or from the attack phase maybe can i zoom in here a bit more here
[00:03:03] we have then here some notes we can change some of the settings so here we have recover
[00:03:12] adjust to receive to recover the character of the original by mixing between re-synthesized and extracted
[00:03:19] signal so you can say or you can see here this is the extracted signal and here in the front we have a bit of the
[00:03:27] uh original sound in it and every time we change something you can hear how it's regenerate
[00:03:36] and we have noise what's noise control the amount of noise like signal to recover from the original so this is then a different
[00:03:55] thing here
[00:04:01] so yeah it's not like ai
[00:04:03] um it's it's nothing magical happening in the background it's basically just a plug-in that tries to
[00:04:12] um narrow down everything you need to a certain process right so when you want to extract something
[00:04:21] um at the moment here there's a model called kick ad ada version one so i guess there are more models coming in the future for snare drums and
[00:04:32] other percussion sounds i don't know but it kind of works really neat here for kick drums in my opinion
[00:04:42] it's a different approach than kick three or kick ninja where they read synthesize everything below
[00:04:50] a certain frequency and then you will lay out the top noise part on top it's kind of similar here but
[00:04:57] it's a different approach and you can fine tune basically everything until you like
[00:05:02] the kick sound and then of course you can save it here down here or you can drag it out right
[00:05:09] then you have
[00:05:11] nice clean kick sample here that you can extract
[00:05:17] which is pretty dope actually to have um i hope they actually bring up more of these models here
[00:05:26] because i want to extract certain uh snare sounds and hi-hat sounds here and there um could be handy
[00:05:33] um so let's try here another one uh let's trace something random here let me see
[00:05:42] there's a lot of music in here let's try this one we drag this in and then again so this is
[00:06:07] this is something here you need that needs to be addressed right that you can just select your part
[00:06:12] instead of moving this here manually from the beginning so let's zoom in here i guess this is
[00:06:19] the first kick drum here yeah yeah you can see it's very dense here this track it's very compressed
[00:06:29] so this is very hard actually to extract kick drums
[00:06:35] um out of this material but but this it kind of works
[00:06:38] nice so now this is our second kick drum here
[00:06:50] nice so and then you can use this and layer it i don't know below a drum loop or just use it as a
[00:06:59] reference kick drum for your new track i think this is a pretty neat idea to have this and i hope they
[00:07:08] come up with some new models here and i have also no problem to pay actually for this because it's very
[00:07:16] handy to have and i need to do this all the time um and yeah i think it's a nice plugin i put the link in
[00:07:24] the description below it's called drum clone and it just came out that's it let me know what you think
[00:07:32] in the comments down below leave a like leave a subscription thanks for watching and i see you in the next video bye