Cymatics Diablo (Mac & Win)

This plugin has been our secret sauce for getting drums to hit super hard for quite a while now. DIABLO is a drum enhancing tool that provides several features for pinpoint control over character and tone, in addition to getting your sounds to hit as hard as possible. With its 7 unique processing modules, you can find yourself using DIABLO in tons of different mixing situations.

 How exactly does DIABLO make drums sound so good?

 Punch
Punch is a transient shaper which boosts the attack of your drums, helping them cut through a dense mix or beefy low end instruments. Use it to help a kick blast through an 808, or to make a floppy snare more impactful and snappy.

 Body
Body is a fast-acting compressor aimed at bringing up the sustain of your drums while clamping down on dynamic range. Try it with 808s or snares that sound too short and need more presence in the mix.

 Boost

• Boost offers a set of equalizers, each with an adjustable frequency range. Each equalizer mode has a unique sound and may be useful for a specific purpose in your mix.
• Kick 1: A Pultec-inspired EQ profile which sounds great on kick drums, useful for adding weight while removing boxiness.
• Kick 2: A wide, classical bell-shape EQ which is handy for boosting low end without adding too much resonance.
• Snare: Sounds great in combination with the Punch knob on snares, or to bring out the “chest” portion of a kick to make it smack.
• Reso: A low-end resonator which can produce sub-harmonics seemingly out of nothing.

 

 Sizzle

• Sizzle is a selection of modes designed to enhance the high end of your sounds. Highly useful in energizing dull sounds and brightening darker ones.
• Grit: Especially useful for creating an impression of high-end in sounds which lack it entirely, or sprucing up snares and high hats. Try it with a dull 808 to brighten it up without distorting.
• Crush: A jittered bitcrushing effect which can impart a crunchy texture to snares, claps, cymbals, and percussion.
• Exciter: A multiband harmonic exciter, useful for livening up claps, snares, and high-hat parts.

 

 Heat

• Heat contains 4 saturation modes to add anything from subtle colour to heavy distortion to your sounds.
• Blaze: Symmetric soft-clipping.
• Demon: Aggressive, tape-like distortion.
• Flame: Transistor-like distortion emphasizing odd harmonics.
• Pyro: Tube-like distortion with a mix of even and odd harmonics.

 

 Clip

• Clip consists of a selectable hard or soft clipper to prevent your signal from clipping, while simultaneously adding harmonic distortion to your sound. It’s extremely useful in combination with the Punch knob to reign in peaky transients while colouring them with distortion.
• The hard clipper distorts early and aggressively, while the soft clipper has a warmer, “rounder” sound when driven.

 

 Width

• When the Width knob is turned past 50%, it functions as a stereo spreader. The HPF switch engages a high pass filter which will only spread the upper frequency range of your sounds. (Use this if you’d like to retain a centralized low end but spread the high end of an 808 or a snare drum.)
• Turning the width knob down to 0% makes your sound mono.

 

 Filter & EQ

• The filter section is composed of a bandpass filter with adjustable upper and lower cutoffs, as well as a tilt filter which can darken or brighten the overall tone of the sound.
• The EQ is a simple 3 band equalizer for fine tuning your drums before going into the Clipper module. Hold shift and move the knobs to adjust the frequency of the EQ.