We don’t normally revisit products after reviewing them. Once we’ve tested something, written about it and published the review, we generally move on to the next piece of gear or software. But every now and then, something comes along that deserves an exception.
Drum Slicer is one of those things.
When we first wrote about the free browser-based sampling tool in July, the appeal was straightforward: record a drum from soft to loud, let the software find the hits, slice them up and turn the result into a usable sample set.
It was a clever solution to one of the least enjoyable jobs in drum sampling.
But that version of Drum Slicer now seems almost primitive compared with what its creator, Jukka “Fatalii” Kilpinen, has built since. And perhaps the most remarkable thing isn’t simply how much the application has changed. It’s how it has evolved.
Built because someone needed it
Drum Slicer isn’t the product of a software company with a development team, marketing department and commercial roadmap.
Jukka didn’t set out to create a commercial drum-sampling platform. He had a problem he wanted to solve — and found a way to build the solution himself.
Then he kept finding things that could be done better.
The result is a remarkable case of software evolving through use. Features have been added because they were useful, problems have been fixed because somebody found them, and the application has steadily expanded from a sample-slicing utility into something much closer to a complete drum-sampling environment.
And it’s still free.
One take in, a finished sample set out
The original concept remains at the heart of Drum Slicer.
Record a drum from soft to loud and the software finds the hits, trims them, aligns them and organises the resulting samples into a velocity set.
But now you can do the whole process without leaving the browser. Drum Slicer can record directly from an audio interface, providing guidance on recording level and counting the hits as they arrive. It can even listen to the acoustic environment and establish a trigger threshold that rejects unwanted room noise without losing quieter ghost notes.
And for those recording with multiple microphones, the latest version can capture the close mic alongside overheads and room microphones, keeping the recordings sample-locked.
That takes the application a long way beyond simply cutting up a WAV file.
Getting the start right
One of the less glamorous — but potentially more important — improvements is the work that has gone into sample starts.
Anyone who has built drum samples knows that the precise start point matters. Too much silence makes a kit feel sluggish; cut too aggressively and you can lose the beginning of the waveform.
Jukka has rebuilt this process from the ground up, analysing hundreds of real drum hits.
The resulting samples now retain the initial waveform without introducing unwanted dead air.
And rather than treating that as a black box, Drum Slicer lets you zoom right into the first couple of milliseconds and fine-tune the start point.
It’s the sort of obsessive detail that tells you this isn’t just a feature checklist. Somebody has actually been listening critically to the results.
From samples to instruments
Perhaps the biggest evolution is that Drum Slicer is no longer simply about producing WAV files. It can now create files for a range of sampling environments, including SFZ and Decent Sampler, with the appropriate instrument files generated automatically.
There’s also specific support for the Pearl Mimic Pro, in both directions.
Drum Slicer can create a finished .mci instrument, complete with naming, library information, articulations, velocity layers and round robins. It can also read existing Mimic instruments and extract their samples.
The latest addition is 2Box .dsnd support, currently described as beta.
That means Drum Slicer is moving into territory normally occupied by specialist conversion and instrument-building software — while remaining a browser application that requires no installation.
The feature list gets increasingly ambitious from here. Drum Slicer can now auto-tune a complete take, compensate for tuning drift and either keep the drum internally consistent or snap it to the nearest note.
There’s a dynamic map showing the recorded hits by loudness, allowing individual samples or groups to be adjusted non-destructively. You can even draw the desired soft-to-loud response and have the samples conform to it.
There are also quality-control tools that flag clipped hits, noisy tails, double strikes and weak layers.
And if you didn’t record enough round robins — or missed a velocity layer altogether — the software can synthesise the missing material from the samples you did capture.
That’s a very different proposition from the simple slicer we originally reviewed.
Building the room around the sample
Another particularly interesting development is the addition of simulated overhead and room microphones.
Rather than simply adding reverb, Drum Slicer attempts to construct those additional perspectives acoustically, using parameters such as microphone distance, height, spread, polar pattern and technique.
You can also use your own recorded overhead and room microphones and compare them with the generated versions.
There is even a drum size and tuning system intended to let you make a recorded drum sound larger, deeper or differently tuned — without simply applying a conventional pitch shift.
Add the effects rack, with EQ, reverb, delay, drive, transient shaping, ring control and sample stacking, and the application starts to look less like a utility and more like a drum-sound design environment.
The effects can be printed directly into the exported samples, too.
The other stuff
There are plenty of other touches that show how far the project has travelled. For example, you can import a single long recording, already-sliced WAV files, a ZIP, an entire folder or a Mimic instrument.
Projects can be saved as sessions and reopened later.
A built-in tuner can help get the drum right before recording, while the tone fingerprint provides a visual overview of characteristics such as brightness, warmth, punch, sustain and grit.
There’s a groove player for auditioning the resulting kit, video rendering for sharing it, and a printable specification sheet documenting what was created.
In other words, the original “slice my drum samples” problem has spawned an entire workflow around creating, editing, auditioning and exporting drum instruments.
Why we’re writing about it again
That’s why we felt this one deserved a follow-up. It’s not simply that Drum Slicer has acquired a lot of new features. Plenty of software gets feature updates.
What’s unusual is the way this particular project has developed.
Jukka has continued to work on it relentlessly, responding to real-world use and feedback rather than simply adding features for the sake of having a longer feature list.
We’ve been among those testing it and pushing back when something didn’t work as it should. Jukka has been remarkably receptive to that process — and, importantly, willing to fix things rather than defend them. In fact, his own acknowledgement is telling: he credits digitalDrummer and Enes Sabanovic with putting real time into testing the application, and inspiring several of the features and fixes in the latest version.
That’s a refreshing attitude in an industry where software developers can sometimes become more invested in defending their creation than improving it.
Still free, still private
And then there’s the bit that really deserves highlighting. All of this remains free. There is no subscription, no account, no installation and no requirement to upload your recordings to a server.
The application runs in the browser, while the audio stays on the user’s computer.
And there isn’t an obvious commercial pitch attached to it.
That makes Drum Slicer something of an anomaly in today’s software world.
A growing number of tools use cloud processing and subscription models to put increasingly sophisticated technology behind a paywall. Drum Slicer has taken almost the opposite route: build something useful, keep improving it, and give it away.
For now, at least, Jukka appears to be doing this simply because he wants to make the tool better. Whether that eventually changes is up to him.
For now, though, it’s hard not to admire the effort. And the most intriguing part is that the story doesn’t appear to be finished yet.
Drum Slicer and the growing collection of ready-made samples are available for free at fatalii.net/drum.