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From Dry to Alive: Giving Drums a Studio Room Feel
Drums in particular are one of the hardest instruments to make feel convincingly “real”. Straight out of the box, loops can sound clean and punchy, but they often lack the space and depth that comes from a live recording. Achieving that realism can be the make or break between a loop that works and a tightly mixed record.
We’ve teamed up with Like It Or Not for a video about placing drums into a believable environment using the UAD Sound City Studios Plugin! This video explores the relationship between your drums and the space that they’re in, offering creative solutions to achieving the sound of a great recording room and world-class signal paths.
What is Like It Or Not?
Like It Or Not is a creator-led agency focused on delivering practical sounds and production ideas for modern music makers. Built on an efficient, practical-solution’s approach, their YouTube Channel is designed to cut through the noise and get straight into exactly what improves a track.
Over the last year, they’ve built a growing audience by focusing on concise videos that tackle specific music production challenges. Rather than long-form content, their videos are digestible and to-the-point, presenting quick, actionable production insights. They’ve covered topics such as “the sounds you hear, but never use”, “your snare needs friends” and “the plugins that make you finish tracks”. They’ve even compiled a handy playlist of all their tutorials so you can quickly dip in and out of inspiring production advice whenever you need it.
What is UAD Sound City Studios?
The UAD Sound City Studios Plugin is a fully fledged studio emulation plugin that recreates the acoustics and workflow of the legendary Sound City Studios recording space. Differing from a reverb or channel strip, the plugins models the physical environment of the studio, capturing how instruments interact, sound reflects and the classic studio equipment involved in recording at Sound City.
The plugin allows you to place your sounds within a virtual live room. You can adjust microphone positions, room configurations and signal paths to shape how audio interacts within the space, ultimately providing you with a sound palette that is nearly indistinguishable from the real studio.
While Like It Or Not’s video focuses on drums, the plugin itself goes far beyond this; allowing you to select your source and get proven room and mic setups used on albums like Nirvana’s “Nevermind”. You can sculpt perfect guitar tones with expertly placed cabinet and microphone setups as well as get the authentic tone of Sound City’s iconic British console), including 3-band EQ and inline compression.
On top of all that, the Sound City Studio Plugin gives you the first-ever emulation of the Dolby A301 noise reduction system and access to their Iconic Echo Chamber so you can get the same natural sounding reverb used by Queens of the Stone Age, Phoebe Bridgers and Death Cab for Cutie.
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