Altering the timbre of your drum kit is one of the most dramatic changes you can make during a mix. To this end, EQ and dynamics processing (gating, expansion, compression, transient-shaping) have been used for many years, but increasingly, engineers are also 'triggering' drum samples to replace or augment recorded drum parts. But why resort to such a radical approach? After all, in these pages we regularly preach the benefits of getting everything right at the recording stage.
Steven Slate Drum Trigger Ex Torrent ~UPD~
At the most basic level, then, you'll need a clean, close-miked, multitrack drum recording. If you have a close-miked kick recording, unless you've recorded very badly, it's pretty easy to spot each hit in your DAW; even snare leakage is likely to be much lower in level than the kick. But it's not always that easy: a tom recording, for instance, may include significant leakage from the snare or cymbals. This makes it trickier to detect each hit. It's usually possible to duplicate the part and EQ it to isolate the desired hits, and then feed that to your trigger software, but that can sometimes be more problematic than it sounds, and even where it's easy it can be time-consuming.
The triggers themselves are mounted on the shells of the kit. They have a transducer making contact with the skin of the drum, so that a fairly soulless-sounding click is output whenever the drum is hit, and the remainder of the time the trigger's output will be pretty much silent. The resulting signal can therefore be recorded into your DAW and used to trigger samples or drive sound modules or virtual instruments.
Andy Sneap provides 'Testament' that drum replacement has become the norm in rock and metal.As well as solving our trigger-signal problem (ie. you now have your transient with no leakage), recording a trigger signal can open up some other useful possibilities. For example, if you're aiming for an open and real sound on your toms and don't want to hard-edit them, but do want to gate them, you can bus the trigger tracks to the key inputs on noise gates inserted on the tom channels. The gates will open and close in accordance with the triggers, rather than the tom track that may have snare leakage.
If your aim is to reinforce the sound of the kit, even though you're using triggers the usual rules for drum recording still apply: you should still set up the kit, tune it and mic it with the diligence you'd apply to any other drum recording; you're still going for a clean recording, with as much separation as you can get between instruments on the close mics.
Remember that you don't have to limit yourself to drum samples, either: depending on the track, anything percussive might give you the added dimension you're looking for; or if it's just depth and fullness you need, it may be that a triggered synth works well. (You do need to be a little careful with sub-bass synths on kicks, though, as they invariably eat into your mix headroom if mixed in too high.)
But you're looking for a more convenient, automatic approach, right? So let's consider how best to use modern drum-triggering software (some of the best of which is described in the box earlier in this article). All the leading drum-trigger plug-ins allow you to load a selection of drum strikes at various different velocities, and to assign them to different velocity groups. The user has control of thresholds for the level or the transients (or both), to determine when each bank of samples comes into play after the software detects the transient. You also have the option of how much to blend the sample with the original, from subtle reinforcement to total replacement.
There are two basic approaches taken by drum replacement software. The first is a real-time trigger: the software detects audio as it is being played (either with 'lookahead' for more accuracy, or in a 'live' mode). The second is an off-line system, whereby the sound is recorded into the plug-in and then analysed, so that you can tweak thresholds and other detection parameters in minute detail. Of course, some of the best software, such as TL Drum Rehab, offers you the option of either approach. However, it's often possible to automate thresholds on real time plug-ins, which can make them almost as flexible.
Two common problems are snare rolls or flams and replacing hi-hats, particularly when the drummer switches between open and closed hi-hats. For the former, if you have difficulty setting the right transient detection thresholds, you might find that you can achieve a more convincing result either by automating the trigger plug-in's input level or multing the drum source out to a separate audio track, chopping it and automating its level before feeding it into your plug-in. Unfortunately, there's really no substitute here for hard work and effort. 2ff7e9595c
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