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Community Tip - Drum Replacement 2

With the support of iLok, more tips & tricks from the community. Here is one from Drew Webster…

Here’s a tip on the topic of replacing drums to go along with a recent tip. Dealing with overheads when replacing drums.  Sometimes you want complete control over the drum sound and want to use the overheads to purely pick up cymbals. As said in a previous tip, you want to do your drum editing (beat detective, elastic audio, etc…) first before doing anything else in post. But here are a few tips:

1) Place your overhead mics closer to the cymbals, and have the diaphragm directed in such a way that the cymbals block it from direct line of sight of any drum.  

2) After your editing and drum replacement is done, be aggressive with the high pass filter so that when your overhead tracks are mixed in with the replaced drums you hear little to none of the original drums. 

3) If your drummer is up to the challenge, do a second take of cymbals only. I’ve been told by drummers that have done this for me that it wasn’t nearly as hard as they thought it would be.  

4) In honour of iZotope’s RX3 being released, you can also use this to get rid of drums from the overheads, just be careful because a little goes a long way, and aggressive editing of overheads can be painfully obvious.  

Hope this helps! Happy mixing!

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