CELEST DSP and Audio Spices are giving BPB readers 5,000 full licenses for Drum Spice, a new drum bus processor normally priced at $59.99.
These are perpetual licenses with lifetime updates. The giveaway is first-come, first-served, and the free checkout will close when all 5,000 licenses are claimed.
Drum Spice is a collaboration between two independent developers, with each company building one half of the plugin.
CELEST DSP handles the Shape engine, which runs a three-band EQ into a feedback-style compressor and tone stage. The Low, Mid, and High controls use fixed drum-focused voicings rather than exposing frequencies and bandwidths.
The compressor follows the FET approach, with Input driving the compression by up to 36 dB and Output providing manual level compensation. The Tone stage has Natural, Dark, and Bright characters for adjusting the overall color.
Audio Spices provides the Flavor engine: a doubler, slap delay, Drum Room reverb, and tape-style drive.
The doubler uses two short modulated voices per side and filters them below 220 Hz, helping the body of the drums sound wider without spreading the kick and sub frequencies. Slap Delay adds one darkening echo with an adjustable time from 70 to 250 ms.
Drum Room is a convolution reverb based on Audio Spices’ room model, with Tight, Room, and Hall sizes, plus adjustable decay. The final Drive stage runs at 4x oversampling and offers Warm and Hot modes, with loudness compensation intended to make tone comparisons easier.
The Route switch changes the processing order. Sending the Shape into Flavor compresses and equalizes the original drums, then adds width, space, and drive. Reversing the order sends those effects into the compressor, which can make the room and delay tails pump with the hits.
Every module has an amount control and an individual switch, and each developer’s entire section can also be bypassed. Global Input and Output trims surround the chain, and the Mix control provides sample-aligned parallel processing. Drum Spice reports the six samples of latency introduced by its oversampled drive to the host.
Audio Spices previously gave BPB readers 10,000 free bundles containing Salt, Chilli, and Basil. Drum Spice incorporates the tape model from Chilli, while expanding the concept into a complete drum-focused chain.
Getting the free copy requires your name, email address, and a password.
After installing the 26 MB download, open Drum Spice and activate the Shape and Flavor panels separately through the corresponding accounts. Activation requires an internet connection once; after that, the plugin can run offline.
Drum Spice is available in VST3 and AAX formats for 64-bit Windows 10 or later. The macOS 10.15 or later version adds AU support and runs natively on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. AAX requires Pro Tools 2018 or later.
Download: Drum Spice (FREE for the first 5,000 users – two newsletter subscriptions and account activation required)
