apTrigga what I'm after?

-Noodles-

3 Initals Mixer
Dec 20, 2007
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I've used a few replacement tools at work, but recently got a session home to find that the kick was distorted in sections (seems like a cable breaking..) but it's got really healthy waveforms.

I'm looking just to replace the kick - will apTrigga be the best tool for the job?

It's been a while since I've looked at what replacement stuff there is out there.. I've had a quick look through the topics here but just found people asking questions regarding the software.

Are there any other under $100 USD replacing software?

[I use Logic 8, on 10.5.5]

Cheers guys!
 
only problem you might find is because your cable is fucked and distorted the sound it could have made loud peak sounds on your recording and aptrigga could pick up those sounds as being hits (like a piezo would work) so you may need to pull the track in separately and clean up any spikes on the waveform.

if its peaking to high i dont think a gate would work for you.

but all in all aptrigga rocks. obviously drumagog is the cream of the crop but its a little on the pricy side
 
An even more cost effective way to go about it if you don't have a trigger tool is just go into the song and manually replace the hits. If the song was tracked to a grid, this shouldn't take you more than 30 minutes. This is what I do RELIGIOUSLY no matter if there's 500 or 2000 kicks in one song.

In ProTools, the quickest way to do this is audition the kick sound you want to use in Import>Audio (best if you have multiple samples like the steven slate library, or even record your own velocities), import it into the session and make sure your region list is open on the right hand side of your editor window (in case you ever want to drag the master region back out onto the track if it becomes truncated within your many edits). When the dialogue comes up select IMPORT TO TRACK: Start of session.

Copy/Cut that sample from the editor and align your new blank kick audio track underneath your visual reference track (or the poorly recorded live track as it may be in this instance)

Make sure your grid mode is set to something like 16th notes and just start duplicating the region by holding CTRL-click and dragging the region to the boundary of each hit that you see above it. I like to use two different hits, sometimes three for doublekick sections, or a mediumhit+hard hit for things like quick kick flams that lead into a snare accent.
Once you get into a workflow you can mindlessly drag kick regions while watching episodes of Weeds or Family guy on your laptop next to you... OH I'M REVEALING TOO MUCH! heh.
Watching movies and TV shows while I work is exactly why I don't charge by the hour. Cuz I know how much time I actually goof off during editing sessions, and as long as its done by the deadline...

After you have replaced all the regions and aligned them properly, select the entire track and do a batch fade like:

IN SHAPE: ROUND SQUARE
EQUAL POWER
OUT SHAPE: DIAGONAL
POST SPLICE
2 MILLISECONDS

this will help blend them together without killing the transients and you won't have any tiny popping when you solo the track.

I get entire albums of quantized material done like this in a few short hours. It may sound tedious, but I find that it gives you time to be in control, cuz let's face it you're gonna spend a bunch of time trying to manipulate the mistriggers anyway. just take the reigns from the get-go!
 
thanks guys..

just finished a 14 hour shift.. will buy it tomorrow after having a play with the demo.
 
I find I use Aptrigga more than Drumagog...I like Drumagog for snare, as it seems to be a quicker, easier sample blending app for me in retaining the feel of the performance.

Aptrigga is a pretty different GUI, but IME it offers better sound (the samples sound quality seems better when triggered, more robust, whereas Drumagog can sometimes sound thinner?) and it uses a lot less processing power over Drumagog. Aptrigga also has some handy features for how the samples are used (dynamic samples, random, dynamic stacking, regular stacking). I like to stack the kick samples, so you can kinda create/shape your own kick sound by blending a few different samples together. For kicks, this is probably my favorite aspect of Aptrigga for replacing kick drums.

I use it for kick and toms.
 
Only thing I wish I could do with apTrigga that Drumagog does is having random hits played within different dynamic groups... As it stands with apTrigga, if you want to trigger dynamically you can only have one loud hit, one medium loud hit, one medium hit, one medium soft hit, one soft hit, etc... And triggering randomly just triggers a random sample completely irrespective of the volume of the original hit... I've been trying to come up with a clever way to make like 3 copies of the track and filter them dynamically so I can use random mode in apTrigga and have a track for each velocity level but so far I haven't come up with a good way of filtering out the hit volumes I don't want...
 
Only thing I wish I could do with apTrigga that Drumagog does is having random hits played within different dynamic groups... As it stands with apTrigga, if you want to trigger dynamically you can only have one loud hit, one medium loud hit, one medium hit, one medium soft hit, one soft hit, etc... And triggering randomly just triggers a random sample completely irrespective of the volume of the original hit... I've been trying to come up with a clever way to make like 3 copies of the track and filter them dynamically so I can use random mode in apTrigga and have a track for each velocity level but so far I haven't come up with a good way of filtering out the hit volumes I don't want...


Yeah, I guess I could see that if you were straight replacing. I usually blend and actually prefer the hits to be a consistent volume (but still "random" hits), so the dynamics and nuance is still in the actual miked drum tone, augemented by the random samples chosen through aptrigga.
 
Yeah, I guess I could see that if you were straight replacing. I usually blend and actually prefer the hits to be a consistent volume (but still "random" hits), so the dynamics and nuance is still in the actual miked drum tone, augemented by the random samples chosen through aptrigga.

That's exactly what I do for the most part too, using the samples almost like a compression tool to add some consistency behind the hits, but yeah for straight replacement it's a bitch which is what I was trying to get at... For straight replacement though I think I'm better off converting all my hits to MIDI and triggering them via something like the Slate sample player (once my DVD arrives!!!)
 
Thanks guys.. Got apTrigga this morning (finally got around to it..).

Works great.

The session is saved!