Producing
DRUGS by Gazillion Industries: A Free Drum-Bus Compressor for Mac and Windows
DRUGS is a drum-bus compressor from Gazillion Industries with one main control. Turn DOSE up and the bus gets denser rather than louder: the developer's description is that peak level barely moves across the whole range of the knob while the room comes up underneath the hits. It is free, or pay what you want, for Mac and Windows, and it is aimed squarely at one sound: the squashed, slightly crushed break that drums take on after a trip through a sampler.
Gazillion's Tony Barko submitted it for the dynamics section of our free plugins guide. What follows is how it works, taken from the developer's own technical description, how a one-knob bus compressor fits a mix, and what to check before you build a template on it.
Our take, after running a few dry breaks through it: this is a very good way to beef up thin drums. Push DOSE past halfway and the kit fills out rather than getting louder. The hits keep their snap, the room swells up behind them, and the whole bus takes on that sampled, pressed-down weight that usually takes a parallel chain and ten minutes to get near. For a free plugin with one knob, it is the quickest win we have had on a drum bus this year.
The sound it is going for
Producers who work with breaks know this sound without having a name for it. Gazillion calls it "vinyl sim": dense drums, the transients kept but the space between them filled in, the room pushed up so the kit sounds like it is in a box with you. It is what a general-purpose compressor does after ten minutes of fiddling with attack, release, ratio and knee on a parallel bus. DRUGS goes at it directly, with those decisions made for you.
"It keeps the attack while bringing out the air and room-sound feel behind the drums."
project of napskint, a Japanese free-plugin round-up, as quoted on Gazillion's pageHow it works
There is no threshold and no ratio. The gain law is a lookup table, so how hard it compresses changes continuously with the input level instead of switching on at a fixed point. DOSE moves the transfer curve, the knee, the attack and the release together, the way one macro knob on a hardware unit would. Release is adaptive with no user control: a hit gets a short release so gain recovers inside the gap where pumping would be audible, and sustained material gets a longer one so it holds rather than breathing.
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| DOSE | The macro. Moves curve, knee, attack and release together. Density rather than level. |
| MIX | Dry against wet, with zero latency in both paths so parallel blends never comb-filter. |
| GAIN | Adds 5 dB after the compressor, before the limiter. On by default. |
| LIMIT | Zero-latency soft ceiling at -0.3 dBFS with a clip light. Attenuates only, transparent below about -0.9 dBFS. On by default. |
Two details matter more than they look. Auto make-up gain is applied after the gain cell, so setting a level cannot disturb the dynamics you just dialled in. And the dry signal stays sample-aligned with the wet one at every MIX setting, which is the thing that goes wrong with parallel compression done by hand in a DAW that does not compensate latency on every route. Our parallel compression guide covers why a misaligned parallel bus thins the low end.
Formats and price
Audio Unit, VST3 and a standalone app on macOS 10.13 or later, as a universal binary for Apple Silicon and Intel. VST3 on Windows 10 or later, 64-bit. Gazillion lists Logic Pro, Ableton Live, Reaper, Cubase, Studio One, Bitwig, FL Studio and GarageBand as hosts. There is no AAX, so Pro Tools is out short of a wrapper. Zero samples of latency on either platform, and no internet connection is needed after activation.
It is free, or name your own price, through Gumroad. Enter $0 if you like; an email address is required, and the download arrives by email so you can grab it on a phone and install later. That address is also how you would hear about an update or a fix.
Using a one-knob bus compressor
The fewer the controls, the more the habits matter, because the plugin will not stop you.
- Turn GAIN off while you judge it. It adds 5 dB and is on when the plugin opens, so out of the box the compressed bus is louder as well as denser, and louder always sounds better. Compare at matched level, then switch GAIN back on if you want the lift.
- Watch the kick's front edge, not the meter. The developer's claim is that peak level barely moves as DOSE rises. If that holds, the meter will not tell you when you have gone too far. The kick's attack will.
- Use MIX as the second knob. Push DOSE until the room is obviously up, then pull MIX back until the drums have the density you want with the transients intact. That is parallel compression, and here it cannot comb-filter.
- Treat LIMIT as insurance. A soft ceiling at -0.3 dBFS on the drum bus catches the odd peak. If the clip light is on all the time, the problem is upstream of this plugin.
Before you rely on it
The checks for any free plugin from a small developer. That it loads and saves its state in your DAW, because a compressor that forgets its setting on reopening a project costs more than a paid one. That the format matches your host: fine for the eight DAWs above, not for Pro Tools. And that the developer is likely to be around in a year, since a bus compressor you build a template on stops loading after an OS update. Gazillion says there will be more plugins; the email at checkout is how you would hear.
"The simplicity allows you to use your ears more, instead of wondering if it is dialed right or not."
A producer quoted on Gazillion's pageProduct details, audio demos and the download are on Gazillion Industries' DRUGS page. The dynamics section of the free plugins guide now lists it alongside TDR Nova and OTT.
