Greetings, my name is Ian Vargo and I am with theproaudiofiles.com.
And today, I’m going to be giving you an introduction to drum augmentation and replacement.
I’m going to be using the Massey DRT plugin and the popular virtual instrument BFD2.
Drum replacement and augmentation is a controversial topic.
There are engineers that say if you can’t record it right then why replace the samples
— it’s a big thing, but the way I look at it is if Roger Nickels, the engineer for
Steely Dan — the man who popularized it and put it into practice — if it was good
enough for him then it’s good enough for me.
So, first off I’m going to be using this song Baby Cake by the band Ugly, Ugly words.
Check it out on iTunes.
Have a listen.
[music]
Ok, so the way I like to look at replacing or augmenting drums is what are the individual
sounds missing.
And for example I find that the snare in this song, which I’m going to solo and play right
now.
[snare drum solo]
Had a nice sort of crack and high end.
But it’s perhaps missing some low end and some room and maybe some explosiveness.
So when augmenting or replacing samples I like to think about what the sound is missing
and add it with additional samples.
So first thing, I’m going to take the clip of the sample, of the snare — excuse me
— and I’m gonna go to Audiosuite, instrument, Massey DRT.
And we see this handy window right here.
This is one of the easiest things in the world.
I can’t believe technology has gotten this far.
I’m going to click analyze, and what we’re gonna see is many many yellow trigger points.
Now this is the demo version of the Massey plugin and I find it works just fine.
But i would definitely recommend Steven Massey’s plugins.
Now, what we see is every time we have a transient the plugin has created a yellow trigger point.
Sometimes we’re going to have too many trigger points.
Maybe it will read a kick sound or a bleed from a hi-hat or something like that, but
in this case I think we’re in good shape.
Let’s take a listen.
[snare with drum replacement]
So I’m fairly certain — perhaps here — that we’re in good shape and that the only trigger
points we’re seeing are trigger points that we want to be converted later to MIDI data.
[snare drum + Massey DRT]
It’s even picking up the ghost notes.
Wonderful.
Ok so we’re going to select this whole clip and we have some options here, we can compress
our triggers or we can raise the overall volume, so we’re gonna do a little bit of each.
And it’s as simple as MIDI drag and drop.
And I’m gonna drag to an instrument track that already has BFD2 loaded up on it.
Going to go to clips, going to hit Y so it drags it to the beginning of the session.
And now every time that we have a snare hit, we also have a MIDI trigger point.
Ok, so let’s take a look really quick.
[snare drum + samples]
And incredibly, not only does it create perfect trigger points, I’m talking pretty much
sample accurate — look at that — but it includes velocity data.
So when we have those ghost notes, it can actually import that into the velocity information,
ok.
So next step I’m going to load up BFD 2.
Which is a really great sampling software.
Gonna load up a snare.
Let’s just go with this one for example.
And now the only issue is that perhaps the notes that we dragged from the Massey plugin
are not actually at where the snare is located.
So as you can see it was set to where the kick was.
So let’s go over to notes, shift and drag.
There we go.
[snare drum + BFD2 sample]
I find that the BFD2 plugin runs a little bit hot.
So you’re gonna have some distortion on your track.
Let’s drag it down a little bit.
And now we have control over room, ambience, you can just use the overhead sound.
So if you have a really close sound, but you want to add some room and some ambience, just
use this.
If you have a sort of roomy snare sound, you can just use the direct signal.
And this plugin goes very deep.
You can change the tuning.
You can change dampening.
There are many other things about this plugin that are great.
What I’m not going to do, I would at this point maybe put some effects, some EQ, some
compression, to sort of sculpt the snare sound the way that I want.
And then I will come out of BFD2 and if I have a very direct sound, I will print it
to a mono audio track.
And let’s just call this new snare.
I like to put in signifiers, so if it’s close I will type in close or if it’s ambient
I will type in ambient just so I know on the track.
Let’s just say for now new snare close.
And then I will very simply hit record and play.
And that is recorded now as audio.
So I could do this many many times and the result is basically whatever those snare and
kick sounds were missing, I can add back in.
In this case I will go through and show you a couple of the different sounds that I used.
So the original snare we have here.
I added this sort of beefy snare sound.
This roomy sound.
And a very distant ambience.
That’s hard to hear I’ll turn it up.
Same thing with the kick.
So we’ve got this kick here.
[snare drum + kick drum]
And I added sort of an upper midrange type sound.
And all together.
It really just helps reinforce the transients and you can have a lot of fun by changing
the style of the performance and the overall vibe of the sound.
And I think drum replacement and augmentation is not cheating whatsoever.
Alright so if you have any questions make sure to contact me and make sure to check
out Baby Cake by Ugly, Ugly words on iTunes.
Once again this has been Ian Vargo with The Pro Audio Files.
Thank you.