The Kick drum is an important part of the mix that is often hard to record, hard to play consistently, and hard to tune. This is where replacement with samples can come in handy.
In this puremix.net exclusive, Andrew Scheps shows you a few ways he uses drum replacement to enhance kick drums in his mixes.
Watch as Andrew:
Blends the sample with the original recording
Sets up replacement programs such as Drumagog, Apptrigga3, Battery and Massey DRT
Converts audio to MIDI and triggers samples via Battery
Edits the velocity of the MIDI using Real Time Properties
Explains the pitfalls of leaving trigger plugins running live inside of your session and shares his bulletproof method for archiving samples with your sessions.
Learn how to accurately place drum samples from the one and only Andrew Scheps. Only on pureMix.net
00:00:07 Bonjour children.
Welcome to Punkerpad UK
and today
we're just gonna do a little tutorial,
if you can call it that,
on adding samples to a live
recording of a kick drum.
00:00:21 It's something that
comes up quite a bit.
00:00:22 Kick drums are sometimes easy to
record, sometimes hard to record
but it turns out they
are quite hard to tune
and they're even
harder to play well.
00:00:32 So, it happens quite a bit where you
want to enhance or possibly replace,
I almost never completely
replace a kick drum
but you do wanna enhance
the sound of the kick drum,
adding the sample is a
very fast way to do that,
it's a consistent way to do it,
you don't have to
worry about bleed,
there's nothing to do with the
way the drummer has recorded it
and gives you added sonics stuff
you can add to the kick drum.
00:00:52 So, we've got a little snippet
of a drumkit, I'll play it for you...
00:00:56 The drumkit itself is pretty well recorded
but we can enhance this kick drum
and see what we get,
so here's what the drum sound now.
00:01:10 So the kick drum sounds pretty cool
but it doesn't sound as
cool as the rest of the kit.
00:01:15 We could do the usual
EQ, compression,
parallel compression, all kinds of stuff.
00:01:20 Maybe some distortion,
maybe lots of distortion.
00:01:23 But today we're here to
talk about drum samples
so all we're gonna do is
leave that kick drum alone
and trigger a sample to blend in with it.
00:01:31 One of the first things that I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna duplicate the track
for triggering samples
because that's the way
I like to think about it.
00:01:39 I like the blend the sample in with
the microphone recording.
00:01:43 I like to have discrete
control over both things.
00:01:46 So, I'm gonna make a copy
of the kick track.
00:01:50 So now I've got the
'kick in' and the 'kick dup',
they sound
exactly the same,
and all I'm gonna do is replace
the audio here with the sample.
00:01:58 There are a bunch of
different ways to do it.
00:02:00 A way that is really simple
is to use something like
Drumagog, and let me call up Drumagog here.
00:02:08 I''m gonna go to my favorite,
it's gonna load up 'Techno 5'.
00:02:12 It's an awesome little sample.
00:02:14 There are lots and
lots of controls on here,
there are basically 3
that I might use.
00:02:20 The sensitivity I'll definitely use,
this is how you set
the sensitivity of the trigger.
00:02:24 Then there is a filter
for the trigger here,
which on this particular
track we're gonna have to use,
I almost never have to use this,
but it does come up where
if your timing is off
it could be some crazy low-end
or something like that interfering
with its ability to trigger.
00:02:39 The other use that use sometimes
is there is a pitch control
so you can actually pitch the sample down
or tune the snare up
to match more of the kit because again,
since I'm blending I want
them to match in pitch.
00:02:51 You can also take an 808,
tune it to the track, that kind of thing.
00:02:54 The only drag about is there is no
like, really fine control of this.
00:02:58 It doesn't tell you how many cents,
it's a percentage, but it does work.
00:03:01 On this particular kick drum track
I'm just gonna set the sensitivity
and what you're gonna hear
is actually gonna be a flam
between the original kick and the kick,
which we'll take care of
with the trigger filter in a second.
00:03:16 And it turns out there's
something going on
in the middle so I'm gonna use
a little bandpass filter
for the trigger filter.
00:03:23 76 Hz, that's fine, that will get
the kick drum into the detector.
00:03:34 Now, there is a kick
drum playing along with
my recorded kick drum,
so I can change the balance here.
00:03:54 Then there's one other slider,
if you're getting lots of extra triggers,
like at the end, the kick gets
a little bit busier,
Drumagog handles it absolutely fine.
00:04:04 And doesn't get confused
by that tom fill.
00:04:07 You can use this resolution slider
and what it will do is change the
minimum time between triggers,
so, it's like this hysteresis
control on another plug-in,
we're gonna look at it in a second,
but it just keeps from really
quick double triggering.
00:04:19 That's about it for Drumagog.
00:04:21 It is overkill if you're just gonna trigger
one sample and there is
a very cheap alternative, called apTrigga,
which looks a lot like this.
00:04:31 It has a lot of the same
controls, there are millions
of other things that both
Drumagog and Aptrigga can do
but we're just gonna
go with it the very quick,
I'm going to have one sample,
and I'm going to trigger it
every time my source audio
gets above a certain level.
00:04:46 So if we look at our 'generator',
I've already loaded in
'Tech 5'.
00:04:51 It's the exact same sample
I loaded into Drumagog.
00:04:53 If we go to our detector view,
what you're gonna see is a similar
thing to the bottom left of Drumagog,
it's just gonna show you the waveform
and you can set a minimum
and a maximum level.
00:05:04 Which is sort of interesting,
so not only can you say:
'only trigger when you're
above a certain level',
which gets rid of the bleed,
but you could actually
set up different zones,
for different velocity levels,
so you can do your own velocity
switching of samples
setting up different zones
within the apTrigga,
we're not gonna go into any of that
but you can do it.
00:05:29 And if I lower this threshold
you'll see it's gonna start
to trigger on the snare bleed.
00:05:40 Very obvious, if we get down
to this busier kick at the end
we'll see if I get my threshold set right.
00:05:48 So, that's all good,
I'm fine triggering that,
this last one I think
it's actually a stray,
it's was tom hit,
but probably, just bring that up...
00:05:55 If you get into a situation
where you're mistriggering,
double triggering,
just like the sensitivity
on the Drumagog plug-in
you have a hysteresis here
which will be
more the difference in level between
two hits that are very close together,
and you can do it in terms of time or in
terms of level, so there's a whole time,
there's also a hysteresis here for level.
00:06:16 That's basically it, load your
sample, it's drag and drop.
00:06:20 You can have multiple samples,
multiple zones, it also has a built-in
oscillator and a noise generator,
just like Drumagog.
00:06:27 So, you can build some very
interesting things,
and there are presets that
use a lot of the built-in
generation stuff,
but just for triggering the sample,
you drag it in,
go to the detector,
set your threshold, hit play.
00:06:41 Now, there's another completely
different way you could do this.
00:06:45 So, what we're gonna do now,
I'm just gonna make
the audio track inactive,
I've got and instrument track down here
where I've loaded Battery.
00:06:52 And the reason I've done that is
I've got, hey, 'Tech5',
exactly the same sample,
but now I'm gonna trigger it with midi.
So the way to do this,
you can't work on an audio track
and make the midi directly,
there's an awesome plug-in called
Massey DRT.
00:07:08 And this will analyze
audio that you give it
and this might look
slightly familiar to you
because this is very similar to the
interface for the old TL Audio plug-ins
because some of the same
people were involved.
00:07:22 But, basically, it analyzes the audio,
it shows you
your individual transients,
and then you basically have a loudness
and a sensitivity slider here,
to say how you trigger.
00:07:32 I watched a tutorial when
I first got this plug-in
years ago and someone said:
'Yeah, to put them kind of
in the middle of your two clumps of stuff
and everything is gonna be fine'.
00:07:40 And they're absolutely right.
So what you notice is,
if I bring my sensitivity up,
a lot of this triggers are
gonna turn into double hits.
00:07:47 So, the sensitivity
seems to be a little
bit like the hysteresis
and the loudness is just
basically the threshold.
00:07:54 So, as you bring things up
and down you start to add
more of the triggers
to where you're gonna
hit your sample.
00:08:01 You can now actually use the
Audiosuite process to render
these samples into your session
from this plug-in.
00:08:09 I don't use that because
I got the plug-in when it first came out
it was just generating midi,
so I always use the midi drag and drop
and then I trigger Battery.
00:08:17 So, when you've got your audio selected
you midi drag and drop from here
and you drop it on to a track,
hold down the Ctrl key
and it snaps it to the same as the audio
that you're triggering from
and now, you've got audio here.
00:08:33 And here's the midi made with it,
you're now done with the DRT.
00:08:37 I've put this on to an instrument
track that has Battery,
with the same sample right there,
being triggered at C1,
and I had C1 as my default note output,
so, if everything is right,
I should be able to just hit play.
00:08:58 So this is three sample accurate ways
to trigger a kick sample
or snare sample or anything
else within Pro Tools.
00:09:04 Drumagog, apTrigga,
which are basically the same idea,
put an insert across the audio,
trigger the sample, it replaces the audio
that's coming out of the plug-in.
00:09:14 Both of them do let you mix between wet
and dry but I don't like to do that.
00:09:18 The other thing you can
do is generate Midi,
I'm gonna show you one other thing
about the Midi that's actually pretty cool.
00:09:25 If the timing is squally,
if you've got
a lot of bleed on this track
it would actually be difficult
to get any of the three
of this plug-ins to do it
consistently,
with setting that don't change.
00:09:36 So, if you go into your midi and
you turn on 'tab to transient',
you can actually tab from
midi note to midi note.
00:09:45 If you zoom in on your midi note,
and I'm gonna move the
midi up by the kick,
what you can do is very quickly
go through
and tab through your midi
and you can edit, now you're noticing
that audio is note moving
above the midi note at all,
so these triggers are dead on.
00:10:04 But let's say that one
looked a little late to it,
so you can actually just trim
the start of the midi note.
00:10:09 Because you're not trimming audio,
wherever the head of that midi
note is will trigger the sample.
00:10:14 And because
Battery is in one-shot mode, it will always
play the entire sample,
it doesn't matter how
long this midi note is.
00:10:21 So, if you have to do any editing,
it is way faster to edit the
midi than it is to edit the audio
because if you wanted to move this later
and you've just rendered a bunch of audio,
how would you do it?
Well,
you'd separate the region here
but then you'd have to go
to your next kick drum,
separate the region there,
then you come back to the beginning,
you'd slide that audio, but now the
tail end of that kick drum you moved later
is covering up the next kick drum
so now you've got to tab to the next one
and use the trim tool
and open up the audio.
00:10:49 This was always the problem using
Sound Replacer,
which was really good,
one of the early Audiosuite ways
to add a sample to something,
but the timing wasn't dead on
and you'd have to through
and edit individual hits
and make them work.
00:11:03 This way you can just use the midi, plus,
this is kind of cool,
you can use the real-time
properties of the midi track
to do all of your velocity.
So, you can take the dynamics,
which by default coming
out of DRT are at 100%,
and you can compress them,
or just crank them up
and now you're changing
how loud the sample is.
00:11:32 So you can do lots and lots of
tweaking that is much more difficult
when you're triggering the sample
directly from the audio.
00:11:38 This gives you something that you
can really tweak and really hone
if you need to.
00:11:44 Don't forget to print
your sample though.
00:11:45 Because what's gonna happen is,
in two years you're gonna
open up the session,
your sample we've moved,
it won't be in the same place,
that's one really awesome thing about
Aptrigga, you can actually tell it
to save the sample inside the plug-in
so it's saved with the session.
00:12:00 Drumagog
will not do that, as far as I know.
00:12:04 And if you're triggering samples
obviously it won't do that.
00:12:08 So one tip I would say,
whenever you're triggering samples,
don't leave them triggering live,
actually render them at some point.
00:12:14 And that gives you an archival proof way
to keep your kick sample.
Once logged in, you will be able to read all the transcripts jump around in the video.
Andrew Scheps is a music producer, mixing engineer and record label owner based in the United Kingdom. He has received Grammy Awards for Best Rock Album for his work on Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Arcadium, Album Of The Year for Adele's 21, and also Best Reggae Album for Ziggy Marley's Fly Rasta.
Andrew started as a musician, but found that what he enjoyed most was working behind the scenes. This led him to study recording at the University of Miami. After graduating, he spent some time working for Synclavier, and then on the road with Stevie Wonder (as a keyboard tech) and Michael Jackson (mixing live sound). But he found his home in the studio, and he honed his craft working for producers such as Rob Cavallo, Don Was and Rick Rubin.
Andrew collaborated with Waves in order to create his own line of plug-ins which include the Scheps 73 EQ and the Scheps Parallel Particles.
Andrew is one of the best known mixing engineers in the world, well-known for his Rear Bus mixing techniques that he developed working on his 64 input Neve 8068 console and his love for distortion of any kind. If you are watching pureMix videos you will see that he managed to carry his analog sound signature over to a fully portable digital rig. These days, Andrew mixes completely In The Box as it allows him much greater flexibility and the ability to work on several project simultaneously.
Thanks for this Andrew! I've always wondered how to efficiently get clean, accurate triggering in busy material without painstakingly running through every single transient zoomed into every single drum mic, but Massey DRT seems to hit the nail right on the head. I can't believe I've never heard about it!
piotrbal
2020 May 15
I am a Logic use, so selfishly, I would like to see it in Logic. However, I admire Andrew and his endless knowledge.
sirthought
2020 May 08
Nice tutorial! Just wish it wasn't Pro Tools centered. The Massey option looks really nice, but it's Pro Tools only. I'd love to hear about something that works similar in Logic or Luna. Fab's team will have to consider this for their next plugin!
franciscowm
2020 May 01
what about Trigger2?
franciscowm
2020 May 01
what about Tigger2?
IgorB
2020 Apr 26
Thanks for the vid! It would be great to learn something about pitch shifting kicks and snares, when to do it and when not.
