Antelope Audio VP Drum-All-Nite

The workhorse of drum recording & mixing

As all things Valley People, the original dyna-mite is one monstrous dynamics processor. It’s capable of absurd amounts of gain reduction while maintaining the signal’s integrity with minimal distortion and unwanted artifacts. If you ever needed an aggressive drum compressor – look no further as we’ve created a faithful recreation of this ingenious circuit in a digital form.

In use

The VP Drum-all-nite is the ultimate parallel-compression cheat sheet for shaping the envelope of drums. Its ability to inject pure energy in percussive waveforms is like no other.

Throw the VP Drum-all-nite in a parallel chain if you want to bring out the drum’s body and roominess. Now set the Limiter to “Peak” mode (6 microseconds attack) and watch how it obliterates all sharp transients while injecting the decays with pure filth and energy.

If you want to achieve the opposite effect – keep the VP Drum-all-nite in the parallel chain, but set the Limiter to “Avg.” mode (10milliseconds attack). Now hear the drums explode through your speakers with punch and spit that would cut through the loudest of guitars with ease. Notice how the snap of the drums is now sitting on a bed of energy. What you’re hearing are the squashed musical decays of the drums.

If you now want to clean up and shorten those decays while maintaining punch – just set the VP Drum-all-nite to “Gate” & “Expander” modes simultaneously. That will tighten up the drums and eliminate any pumping while preserving the signature punch and spit.

Behind the curtains

The VP Drum-all-nite’s enormous envelope-shaping abilities are accessible via a slick and straightforward control panel. Its faceplate includes familiar controls like Threshold, Release, Range & Output for quick & easy operation, but what happens behind the curtains is far from ordinary or straightforward.

The circuitry behind most of its parameters has been redesigned with proprietary Valley People technologies that bear little resemblance to anything else on the market. For example, the Release control features Anticipatory Release Computation. Like a Look Ahead feature, this technology anticipates the incoming signal and prevents waveform modulation or excessive pumping.

How we did it

We found one of these well-preserved analog pieces and carefully emulated every component to create the perfect analog sound and digital functionality synergy. We carefully emulated every aspect of this circuit and included it in our VP Drum-all-nite.

New side-chaining functionality

We can now offer external side-chaining functionality for real-time effects in the Synergy Core library. To enable side-chaining with VP Drum-all-nite switch to “external mode” and select the input source you want to chain the effect with.