In Summary
Whether it’s for managing recording disasters or supercharging existing sounds, replacing or layering up drum sounds is yet another DAW technique that keeps on giving. Here we round up reasons to fly in new sounds and some ways to do it.
Going Deeper
Why Use Additional Drum Sounds?
Managing Disasters
Things go wrong. Seeing a mic disappear during a take is fine if it gets spotted early on (preferably on that first run-through!), but for live recordings, or anything else done out in the field, things can and do go wrong. Of course, no amount of prep can deal with a mic that dies mid flight (why don’t they ever give up when they’re safely in the drawer?). For those times when your mic goes AWOL replacement is a godsend.
Better Sounds
Sometimes there needs to be an artistic shift of gear, and replacing sounds, or layering existing sounds can be especially valuable. Full-on replacement can work in more ‘produced’ styles. Otherwise, trying to replace nuanced playing where the overhead mics play a big role may be harder to get right. Hits that are loud, proud, and reliant on the close mics are easy to replace, with treatments taking the least time with the greatest returns.
For some, augmenting or layering existing sounds will be the norm rather than the exception, but in this case layered sounds can often be used hiding in plain sight. Layers are great for filling out drum sounds wherever they are lacking. Contrasting sounds that add fizz or brilliance can round off a fuller-sounding drum; conversely, flying in that Linn snare sample can bring an authoritative thump to tighter, brighter sounds.
Triggers For Additional Drum Sounds
Editing
One of the oldest and simplest ways to trigger samples or clean hits of your own in the DAW is to manually edit them in; the speed and ease with which this can be done varies between DAWs. Many allow accurate ‘tabbing’ up to transients for pasting samples over existing sounds; things get a little clunkier with layer tracks where you need to navigate between tracks in a ‘tab-navigate-paste-navigate-repeat’ type workflow. Some DAWs allow you to string shortcuts together into one for super-speedy timeline samples.
Gating
The traditional use of gates might be rooted in cleaning up what’s already there, but many can also generate useful MIDI that can be used to fire off samples. Strapped across a close mic, the gate’s familiar controls can be used to zero-in on the wanted hits, before generating the required note and velocity data. This latter stream will often need its values tweaked to match the available samples’ velocity layers. Very intricate parts can generate hours of work, but some DAWs offer tricks like ‘compressing’ velocity values such as with Pro Tools’ Real Time MIDI Properties.
One drum-specific intelligent gate is Sonnox’s excellent Drum Gate. Not only does this one speak MIDI, but its AI already knows what a drum actually sounds like; in use it quickly becomes clear that agonising over thresholds or navigating false triggers is no longer a problem. Just click the icon for the drum you’re fixing and move on… Try it for free:
Hardware triggers
Clip-on drum triggers are widely used for live hybrid and pure electronic drum sounds, however when set up right they can be useful in the studio; their outputs can be recorded as audio for cleaner, ready made MIDI triggering in the box. Going further, the discontinued Alesis’ Trigger IO lives on as DDrum’s DDTi trigger interface. This converts a trigger’s audio output to MIDI data that can be recorded directly to a track. Units such as Roland’s TM-6 also have onboard sounds, however printing these might be a little odd versus using virtual instrument sounds.
Sound Sources For Additional Drum Sounds
Taking generated MIDI, the simplest way to trigger samples is using a drum virtual instrument (VI), or any sampler with the right sounds loaded up. There is hardware machine sampling for the brave, but most now go for an easier life in the box when it comes to drum rehab. Simple VIs are perfect for anyone who needs only basic layering or replacement, although for more nuanced playing or a wider choice of sounds, more advanced self-contained solutions exist.
Self contained drum replacement software can take the form of drum VIs with extra specific tools for replacement, or dedicated replacement/augmentation VIs whose whole thing is firing drum samples from acoustic sounds.
Either option will not only have a huge library of sounds, and also the tech to generate drum-specific note data from acoustic drum hits. Because it’s all in one window the MIDI and the sounds should play nicely together almost straight away; this isn’t always true when firing external MIDI into a basic VI. Replacement-specific tools on the other hand usually have vast selections of drum sounds, featuring realism boosters such as randomised or round robin (alternative A-B) triggering. Features such as deeper editing of MIDI and audio, and the ability to route out to a DAW channel for processing and mixing complete these tools’ power.
Mixing Additional Drum Sounds
Once MIDI triggers are firing the right layers at the right time, they can be mixed like any other drum sounds. Although what that means is a colossal subject of its own, there are some sample-specific things to consider. The first one is that of phase. In the case of layered sounds, sometimes simple polarity inversion will solve any hollowed-out sounds that aren’t punching as they should. Engineers can spend a lot of time optimising the finer points of acoustic drums’ phase relationships in the mics; experimenting with samples’ phase can change the sound but whether that shift is good or bad is a matter of taste. Certainly using a dedicated tool such as Auto Align 2 will rotate waveforms to get the greatest synchronicity on a technical level.
As mentioned, many VI’s allow their channels to be routed out to DAW channels on a 1-to-1 basis, meaning that samples can be mixed just like any other kit piece. For those VIs that don’t provide this, some sneaky soloing in the instrument’s mixer and taking bounces is a universal way to get sounds on their own track…
The Best Way?
OK, so prevention is always better than cure, but when faced with mixing drum sounds that are dead-on-arrival, something has to be done one way or another. In other situations, sounds that aren’t quite there might need to be kept with a little help from an extra layer of augmentation.
Whatever the reason to replace or augment drums with samples, the options to do it used to be far fewer. As many have discovered, massaging sounds as much as possible to get them to a better place can be fruitless. Manually overdubbing that duff snare with something better can work, but this depends so much on the playing and the genre. Luckily, the drummer now gets to go home when the rest of the band does - we now have a number of ways to achieve what used to be impossible thanks to the power of triggered drum samples.