Hey guys, in this video we’re going to cover how to use drum replacement in Cakewalk by
BandLab.
This is an advanced technique to make drums recorded in the home studio sound better,
by replacing or reinforcing parts of the kit with samples, such as the snare or the kick
drum.
This process can be time consuming but can really provide great results if it’s done
properly.
Before we start with this video, let’s do a quick comparison of the before and after
for the drums we’re working with.
Here’s the original drum sound with a few minor tweaks made to the original drum recordings.
I didn’t spend too much time dialing in the sound while recording just to replace
them in this video, so they could definitely be better.
The recordings were mostly done with a cheap set of CAD drum mics, a Shure Beta 52A on
the kick, and an SM57 on the snare, all running through the Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 for the
audio interface into Cakewalk.
Here’s the edited drum sound we’ve created by replacing some of the sounds with samples.
The first step is to actually install the Drum Replacer in Cakewalk, since it’s not
there by default.
Open the BandLab assistant, which is the program we used to install Cakewalk, switch to apps,
open the dropdown for Cakewalk, and install the Drum Replacer add on.
Then launch Cakewalk with a drum project.
For the drum recordings, I made sure to use separate microphones on the parts of the kit
that I’ll be replacing, like the snare, kick, and the toms.
These microphones usually act to reinforce the sound from the overheads, but in this
case I’ll be using them more as a trigger for the sample that will be played when a
certain threshold is reached.
It’s important to make sure the different parts of the kit are isolated to get this
to work properly.
Technically, the drum replacer can extract some drum sounds by using a filter, but it’s
really not good enough to tell the different parts of the kit and trigger them accurately
from just the overheads alone.
The drum replacer tool in Cakewalk doesn’t work like a typical effect plugin.
Instead, it acts as what’s called a Region Effect in the program.
Let’s start working on the snare drum.
First click and drag over the snare track to highlight it all.
Then right click, go to Region FX, select Drum Replacer and Create Region FX.
To load it, just double click the snare clip that now has Drum Replacer written beside
the name.
We need to double click on that top bar.
If we make a mistake and add a region effect by accident, we can right click on it again
to remove it under the same menu.
Since we’re working with the snare one this track, press the power button next to the
kick to turn it off, which is on by default.
Now press the power button next to the snare to turn it on.
The top of the drum replacer controls has a dry/wet mix, so you can blend the original
sound with the sample, or leave it as 100% wet to completely replace the sample.
It won’t truly be replaced on the final track anyways since we’ll still be hearing
the real snare in the overheads.
There’s a few things we can do for the snare to control it.
First, we can click the roots snare dropdown to change the snare sound, and I’ll change
it to Metalhead snare.
Otherwise if we just click this we can select a snare sample from somewhere else on our
computer.
The filter knob helps adjust the frequency that it’s triggering at, which can help
separate the snare from other parts of the kit that are interfering with it, or just
make it easier to trigger at the right time.
We can see how the waveform changes as we change the filter frequency.
Then we can adjust the interval to lengthen it if we’re getting double hits where we
shouldn’t, or shorten it if notes are being missed.
Then we adjust the threshold to set the level it will trigger a sample at.
Too low and we’ll get triggers when we shouldn’t, but too high and we’ll miss notes.
We should get this as close as possible, then go back and manually adjust it to add or remove
triggered snare hits.
Now let’s cover how to work with the triggered snare hits.
There’s two ways the snare sample can be triggered.
It can be detected and triggered automatically by the drum replacement program, or added
manually.
The top row in orange shows the detected trigger points as orange bars.
If we click one of these orange bars, it becomes half the height and that means it’s disabled.
If we click it again, it enables again.
The row below that is for manually entered triggers.
We can click at different time points to add triggered notes, and then we can right click
them again to remove them.
The last thing we want to cover is adjusting the velocity.
By clicking on the yellow bars that are manually added, we can drag them up or down to change
the velocity, which basically only changes the volume of the sampeld notes.
Automatically detected notes get a velocity value based on how loud the trigger was, and
that determines the volume, but we can change whether it is always the same volume with
it set to 100%, or completely dependent on the trigger volume, when set to 0%.
Usually we keep it at the default which is somewhere in the middle.
Now let’s quickly move on to the kick drum.
We’ll repeat the process for the kick and all the toms, exactly the same as we did with
the snare, but with different samples.
Once again, let’s listen back to this drum replacement we’ve created.
As we can tell from this, the drum replacement plugin in Cakewalk does work well and it’s
pretty easy and quick to use.
When using this though, we have to remember what it’s for and the limitations.
It works well on isolated drums where a volume spike can be an effective trigger, but it
won’t work well on just a set of overheads and you absolutely won’t be using it to
replace things like a hi hat and cymbals, since they simply can’t be separated out
as easily as a snare and kick drum.
For me, if anything, I like the way it can easily create a really punchy snare or kick
sound without much effort.
Thanks for checking out this video on using drum replacement in Cakewalk by BandLab.
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