XLN Audio has released DB-30 Drum Butter, a multi-effect plugin designed for drum processing. It’s available at an introductory price of $99 until April 30th, after which it goes up to $129. A free trial is also available.
DB-30 is built around the same workflow philosophy as XLN Audio’s hugely popular RC-20 Retro Color, so if you’ve used that plugin, the layout will feel familiar.
The goal here is to let you have fun with quick experimentation and get immediate results. You can drop it on a drum loop, drum machine pattern, or live recording, and apply a variety of effects right away.
The plugin has six effect modules, each controlled by a large knob that sets the amount.
Boom Shack is a dual module. The inner knob controls Boom, which adds sub-bass weight to the low end (typically the kick). The outer ring controls Shack, which layers characterful noise over snares and hi-hats.
Boom has a color control and an Acid mode for grittier tones, while Shack offers selectable noise types, a tone knob, and an envelope filter with resonance. There’s also a Post button that lets you route Boom Shack’s output directly to the master section, bypassing all other modules.
Shift is my favorite one of the bunch. It handles frequency and formant manipulation independently or in tandem. You basically turn the knob clockwise for a higher, chipmunk-like feel, or counterclockwise for a darker character. You can also invert the frequency direction relative to the formant for some unusual results.
Space provides reverb with 20 styles ranging from natural rooms to vintage hardware emulations and more experimental options, with controls for decay, stretch, predelay, duck, and pan/width.
Compress offers six modes tuned for drums. Punch (VCA-style), Glue (bus compression), Smack (FET-style), Warm (soft knee, slower attack), Gentle (optical-style), and OTT (multiband up/down compression). You can blend between downward and upward compression and crossfade between single-band and multiband processing, which gives a lot of flexibility from a single module.
Saturate has six distortion flavors (Console, 4 Track, Tape, Tube, Digital, and Flub) with a Flavor slider for fine-tuning the character within each mode.
More sits at the end of the chain and combines a waveshaper with a clipper for added density and loudness, with 2x and 4x multipliers if you want to push things further.
A couple of features run across multiple modules.
Focus filters let you limit which frequency range a module processes, so you can keep the low end clean while saturating the mids, for example. Target sliders let you apply processing to transients or sustain independently, which is useful for adding distortion to tails without clobbering the attack, or vice versa.
The four middle modules (Shift, Space, Compress, Saturate) can be reordered by dragging, and the processing order can make a real difference.
The Magnitude slider at the top scales all six module knobs and the master section proportionally, which is handy for dialing everything back or pushing it all forward in one move.
The master section adds global EQ with four tone shapes (including a Pultec-inspired low bump), Air for top-end sparkle, Attack and Sustain transient shaping, a soft clipper, and a loudness match feature.
The plugin ships with over 260 presets, and you can lock individual modules while browsing, so you keep what you like.
DB-30 Drum Butter requires macOS 10.13 or later or Windows 10/11 (64-bit) and supports VST3, AU, and AAX formats. A standalone version is also included.
More info: DB-30 Drum Butter by XLN Audio ($99 intro / $129)
Last Updated on March 31, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
