Drum Filters
Instagram filters, but for how your drums sound. Load a phone video of your kit, tap a genre and hear it re-mixed while it plays — punchier kick, cracking snare, a bit of room, properly loud. Free to try on any clip; a free account lets you save the finished video, watermark and all, ready for Reels or TikTok. Nothing leaves your device.
Punchy kick, cracking snare, a bit of room. Big but not showy.
Exporting is a free-account perk.Create your free account in a new tab — your clip stays loaded here and the button unlocks the moment you're signed in. One email, no card, and you get every other member perk too.
How it works
- Load a clip. Pick a video straight from your camera roll — landscape or portrait, up to 90 seconds. The audio is read and levelled on your device in a second or two.
- Tap a filter. Press play and switch between them while the clip loops; the change is instant, and the badge on the picture always says what you're hearing. Tap Hear the original to flip back to the raw recording, or hold it down to compare and let go. Members can nudge the punch, crack, air, room and grit of any preset.
- Export. With a free account, tap Export and the browser plays the clip through once, drawing the watermark and encoding the new audio into a fresh .mp4. Save it, or Share straight to your camera roll and post.
The filters
- Clean — Louder and clearer, nothing else. The honest one.
- Rock — Punchy kick, cracking snare, a bit of room. Big but not showy.
- Metal — Tight, scooped and aggressive. Clicky kick, snare like a rifle.
- Jazz — Warm, open and dynamic. Cymbals shimmer, the kit breathes.
- Pop — Bright, polished and radio-loud. Plate reverb on the snare.
- Funk — Dry, snappy, in your face. Every ghost note counts.
- Stadium — Bonham-sized. Huge kick, slow squash and a long hall behind it.
- Garage — Raw, gritty and slammed. Punk basement, first take.
- Vintage — Tape-warm and rolled off. Sixties soul, seventies breaks.
- Lo-fi — Dusty and squashed. Boom-bap drums for a chill-hop loop.
Every preset is a different answer to the same problem. A phone records a kit the same way every time: the built-in limiter flattens the hits, the low-mids around 200–400 Hz turn boxy, the snare loses its crack above 3 kHz, and the whole thing lands quiet. Underneath the genre names, each filter is a mix engineer's chain — a high-pass to clear the rumble, EQ to carve the mud out and put the punch and crack back, a touch of saturation, a bus compressor with some parallel squash for weight, a synthesised room, plate or hall, and a limiter so it comes out as loud as everything else in the feed.
Recording a drum video that filters well
Filters can only shape what the mic caught, so a few seconds of setup makes a bigger difference than any preset:
- Back the phone off. Two to three metres from the kit, roughly at head height, gets you a balanced picture of the whole thing rather than the nearest cymbal. Too close and the phone's limiter spends the whole clip clamped shut.
- Keep it away from the cymbals. Point the mic side of the phone at the snare and kick, not the ride. Cymbal wash is the hardest thing to fix afterwards.
- Tune the kit. A ringing, out-of-tune tom sounds worse after EQ, not better. Two minutes with the drum tuner first pays off in every clip.
- Turn off the phone's own audio processing where you can — "wind noise reduction", "audio zoom" and the like — and don't use the front camera, whose mic is usually the worst on the device.
Where to go next
Posted the clip? Put it on your drummer profile — a free link-in-bio page built for drummers, with your kit, videos and links on one URL. And if the recording made you want a better-sounding kit rather than a better-sounding file, ask the Gear Guru what heads and cymbals would suit the sound you're chasing.
Drum Filters questions
Is Drum Filters free?
Yes. Load a clip, try every preset and compare it with the original for free, with nothing to install. Downloading or sharing the finished video needs a free Drum Faster account — one email, no card — which also unlocks the fine-tune sliders and lets you choose where the watermark sits.
Where does my video go?
Nowhere. The whole thing runs inside your browser: the audio is processed on your phone or laptop and the new file is written on your device. Nothing is uploaded to us or anyone else, which is also why there is no waiting for a server.
Will it make my drums sound like a studio recording?
Honestly: no, and nothing can. A phone mic has already squashed the transients and mixed the whole kit onto one channel before the file reaches us. What the filters do is what a mix engineer would do with that recording — tame the boxy low-mids, bring back the crack of the snare and the punch of the kick, glue it with compression, add a little room and make it properly loud. It sounds mixed rather than raw, which is a big step up for a clip going on Instagram or TikTok.
Which files work?
Anything your browser can play: iPhone .mov (including HDR), .mp4 from Android, and audio-only files like voice memos, .m4a, .mp3 and .wav. Clips up to 90 seconds — Reels and TikTok length. Longer than that, trim it in your phone's editor first. On iPhone, Safari cannot read the sound straight out of a .mov, so the tool plays the clip through once to capture it; you hear the filter live while it does, and after that you can scrub and export as normal.
Why is there a watermark?
The tool is free and it stays free because the small drumfaster.com tag in the corner is how other drummers find it. Members can pick the corner and make it smaller, but every export carries it.
Why does exporting take as long as the clip?
Because your browser has to re-draw every frame of video to burn the watermark in, and it does that by playing the clip through once. A 30-second clip takes about 30 seconds. Keep the page open and in the foreground while it works; if you switch away, it pauses and carries on when you come back.
What format do I get back?
On iPhone, iPad, Mac and most Chrome and Edge browsers, a standard .mp4 (H.264 and AAC) that Instagram, TikTok and YouTube all accept as-is. A few browsers without a built-in AAC encoder fall back to .webm. Audio-only clips come back as .m4a, or .wav where AAC is not available.