Singtall Drum Clean
Clean kick and tom tracks without a single gate. Free for life!
Tom and kick mics spend most of a song picking up snare, cymbals and each other. The usual fix is to slice every track by hand until only the real hits are left, then glue it back together. A gate is quicker, but it can't tell a loud snare hit in the tom mic from a quiet tom hit. Singtall Drum Clean does the slicing for you. It listens to the whole kit at once, keeps every real kick and tom hit with its full ring, cuts the rest, and glues each track back into one item.
Reaper 6 or newer · no registration required · works best after Singtall Drum Align
Between the real hits, a tom mic is mostly hearing the rest of the kit. Drum Clean keeps each hit until it rings out and removes everything in between.
How to use it
- Use it at the start of a mix, before any plugins. Run Singtall Drum Align first, so every mic is lined up.
- Select all your drum tracks, not just the kick and toms. Drum Clean uses the snare, overheads and other mics to recognise what's bleed.
- Run Singtall Drum Clean from the Action List. Reaper pauses for a few seconds while it listens to the whole song.
- Read the report. It lists how many hits each track keeps and how much bleed goes. Press OK.
- Listen to the kick and toms. One Ctrl+Z puts everything back.
What it does for you
Listens to the whole kit
It learns how much of each drum leaks into each mic. A sound in the tom mic only counts as a hit when the rest of the kit can't explain it.
Keeps the whole ring
Each hit stays from just before the attack until it rings out, with short fades. Fills stay in one piece, and long floor tom decays aren't chopped.
Keeps what it isn't sure of
Quiet ghost notes and borderline hits stay in. Leaving a little bleed is better than losing a real hit.
Keeps a backup
Before cutting, plain copies of the tracks go into a muted "Drum Clean originals" folder on the same timeline. If anything turns out to be missing, it's still there.
Install it by hand
- Download
Singtall_Drum_Clean.luausing the button above. - In Reaper, open Actions → Show action list.
- Click New action… → Load ReaScript… and choose the file you downloaded.
- It now appears in the Action List. Add it to a toolbar or give it a shortcut.
Install with ReaPack
With ReaPack installed, you'll get updates automatically. If you already added our repository for Drum Align, Drum Clean is in it too. Otherwise, go to Extensions → ReaPack → Import repositories… and paste:
https://singtallstudio.com/reapack/index.xml
Then open Extensions → ReaPack → Browse packages, search for Singtall Drum Clean and install it.
Good to know
- Only kick and tom tracks are cleaned. It finds them by name (kick, tom, floor, rack). Snare, cymbal, overhead and room tracks are never changed.
- Mics on the same drum, like kick in and kick out, are treated as one drum, so they never count as bleed for each other.
- It reads the audio before any FX, so plugins already on the tracks don't change what it hears.
- Gluing writes new audio files into your project's folder. Your original recordings stay on disk.
Like it? Try our EQs.
Once your drums are aligned and clean, they need far fewer plugins. Singtall EQ Pro is free, and Engineer, Producer and Master are dynamic EQs from the same studio, each with a 14-day free trial and no card required. Compare the editions → or get updates on new free tools.