Drum replacement: Triggering from raw track VS. duplicating track VS. sending to aux

[bryan_kilco]

Hey all. Just wanted a few opinions on this topic.

I see a lot of people duplicating, say, a kick track for sample replacement and applying the plugin on the duplicated track.

I've recently watched a few of Erkans videos HERE, and see this is what he did. And he also used a JS plugin to sample-align the raw with the sampled track.

I have always just kept my raw kick track and sent that to a bus/aux track where I load Trigger.

I've tried playing with that JS plugin on the bus with Trigger on it to align the 2 tracks properly, and it didn't work properly. The raw and sampled tracks sound fine to my ears the way they are. Maybe it's because there is no physical audio on the bus/track that I'm sending to?



TL;DR: Thoughts/experience/benefits with triggering from a bus compared to duplicating the track, compared to ??!?!

 

[Studdy]

Print Track and Align by hand.

 

[bryan_kilco]

Print Track and Align by hand.

Well, I normally am triggering from audio. And I've literally about had my head explode as trying to get a full song of kick hits to all trigger properly was proving to be a challenge. (I will avoid having to automate Trigger every 5 seconds) and use comps, limiters, clippers to try to get the kick hits all trigger properly before using automation.)

So, say you have 75% of a kick track triggering properly, then what? Print and use another instance of Trigger on the mistriggered parts? Or automate first and foremost?

 

[Studdy]

Just do small parts at once. Print the verse, adjust if necessary, print the pre chorus, adjust, print chorus.

I have had many instances when I could trigger an entire song at once. I use the newest drumagog. Im not really sure what else you are asking.

 

[mva801]

I usually duplicate the track to blend with trigger. This way you can modify the duplicated track in any way to help it trigger. On a kick, pulling out all the lowend can help prevent mistriggering, especially on faster stuff. You wouldn't want to do this if you're blending from an aux, because then you're killing your original sound to set it up for triggering. I'll sometimes duplicate the track and use Massey DRT to convert the audio to clicks (like from a manual trigger) if it's really messy. But you need Pro Tools for that plugin.

 

[bryan_kilco]

Hmm I'll give that a shot. Still just fumbling around with the demo version of Trigger. Guess I should just fork out the $ and buy the real deal.

But yeah - I seriously about lost my cool when trying to get whole songs to trigger right. I guess it's all about breaking the audio into smaller chunks like you said.

 

[bryan_kilco]

I usually duplicate the track to blend with trigger. This way you can modify the duplicated track in any way to help it trigger. On a kick, pulling out all the lowend can help prevent mistriggering, especially on faster stuff. You wouldn't want to do this if you're blending from an aux, because then you're killing your original sound to set it up for triggering. I'll sometimes duplicate the track and use Massey DRT to convert the audio to clicks (like from a manual trigger) if it's really messy. But you need Pro Tools for that plugin.

For my last project, I sent the processed kick to a bus where I did some processing before Trigger to get most of the hits triggering. It worked better than I suspected, but it was still a PITA.

Sorry if my question seems noobish or silly. It was really the only part of the project that literally had me going crazy. But, like said, still mucking around with the demo version of Trigger.

 

[Studdy]

I think I'm the last true Drumagog fan on here. lol

I love Drumagog 5.

 

[KHE]

I usually duplicate the track to blend with trigger. This way you can modify the duplicated track in any way to help it trigger. On a kick, pulling out all the lowend can help prevent mistriggering, especially on faster stuff.

+1!

the kick is usualy the easiest shell to replace, unless it's very bad played / tuned. make sure you raise the hi-pass in trigger and finetune retrigger / sensitvity to avoid mistriggering. i would use "dynamics" and "range" to limit the dynamic-range instead of pre-processing.
and don't fear some automation, it's very helpful! sometimes i splitt the trigger-track and use a gain-plugin as "item-fx" (reaper) to raise weak hits / passages. but again, triggering a kick is usualy very easy.
maybe you want to upload the kick-track and i try to help you with the settings?

edit: just as a warning, you will get insane once you try to trigger busy tom-tracks...

cheers!

 

[mva801]

Also FWIW, making sure a busy track is all triggered and replaced phase accurately has driven ALL of us insane at one point or another. Shit just takes a while sometimes! That's why I charge by the hour!

 

[bryan_kilco]

Thanks guys!

I could post a clip, but the session is done and over for about a month now. It's just my own bands demo stuff.

There was one small area I didn't catch where it didn't catch a quick kick triplet which happened about 3-4 times in a clean/quiet part, in which my drummer got insanely pissed off at. But I was done and wasn't about to go back into the session and possibly fuck up more than it was worth to fix a few hits.

But we'll be pre-pro'ing some new stuff soon. I've never recorded an outside band except for a friends bands demo a few years ago which was a joke and never got past drum tracking.

Our drummer bought a set of the Ddrum Redshot triggers. Kick trigger broke. Twice. Before he even got it working properly. So, I've just been triggering off the audio from kick/snare and leaving the toms natural.

It literally came down to me spending the entire day before our first show (new lineup) to get a 2 track demo mixed. And I cringe listening back because I spent so much damn time trying to get kicks triggering properly that I didn't have the time or energy to go in and really surgically EQ things properly. =/

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6443251/Si...he Fire - DEMO - Illness (Online Version).mp3

 

[xFkx]

dunno, I just aux it, i'm kinda lazy when it comes to printing stuff..

afterwards I use a phase alignment plug-in if there are some issues with the natural drum and the triggered samples playing together

 

[LBTM]

Converting the drum to a midi file by sending the triggered midi signal to a new track and recording and then making edits to time-align it. That's what works best for me. If it's a demo and I'm bored I trigger it from the raw track without reviewing it.

 

[bryan_kilco]

Converting the drum to a midi file by sending the triggered midi signal to a new track and recording and then making edits to time-align it. That's what works best for me. If it's a demo and I'm bored I trigger it from the raw track without reviewing it.

See, I've tried this and it never worked right.

I've tried using ReaTune to turn audio to MIDI, but it just misses 90% of the hits totally. I'd love to figure this method out because it'd give me soooo much more control.

 

[Skinny Viking]

you're always gonna have to make some manual fixes / adjustments with almost any program / plugin you use

If its something where I need the natural kick in, I'll edit 1st and then replace with Trigger after ... printing to a new track. Usually I'll throw an EQ on 1st to take out the low end and give a spike where the attack is strongest. Sometimes compression after the EQ to level things out better and then a couple minutes of fine tuning Trigger's dynamics and envelopes. Total amount of time not including editing = 3-5 minutes and then print.

Afterwards I'll just QC check to make sure all of the printed hits are lined up. This takes roughly about the same amount of time as for the song to play through. You might have to snip a couple hits and slide them a bit once in a while but for the most part Trigger is the best thing I've used for this

If I'm not concerned about having any natural kick and all of it will be filtered out of OHs .. I'll convert the kick best I can to midi, quantize to the grid (if the drums were done to a click) and then replace from there.

 

[bryan_kilco]

Yeah Skinny, I had to manually copy/paste some stronger hits over some weak ones since our drummer seems to have left-foot weakness during SLOWER double kick parts, oddly enough, and gets much louder during faster double kick.

Can anyone possibly explain to me the best way to convert audio to midi? This is something that always stumped me. In Reaper, btw, if that matters.

 

[LBTM]

Can anyone possibly explain to me the best way to convert audio to midi? This is something that always stumped me. In Reaper, btw, if that matters.

I will try to make a video tutorial in a few hours.

 

[Pinknoise]

I recently tried audio to midi on a few kik tracks with Melodyne it worked great.
I prefered it to Logic's way...less clicks.
I also tried with Reaper but the audio to midi (using a midi triggering plugin cant remember the name) beahaves weirdly did'nt really like it maybe I did something wrong.

 

[topsoul182]

I'm not sure if you can in the demo, but you can convert the audio to midi in trigger. In trigger go to settings and then there should be like a midi out button. Turn that on and then pick what note you want it to make. Then let the song play all the way through. Then after that go on the left side where you see the arrow pointing up next to the X. Drag the arrow onto a new track in reaper

 

[Uros]

Can anyone possibly explain to me the best way to convert audio to midi? This is something that always stumped me. In Reaper, btw, if that matters.

• Right click on item, then click on Item processing>Dynamic split items, and a dialog box will appear.
  
• Click on 'Set transient sensitivity', set Sensitivity to 100% and adjust Threshold on desired track so that it picks up hits as good as possible.
  
• Click Split. Now your track is sliced up. Fix undetected hits manually by using tab-to-transient and cutting.
  
• When you have finished this (so that you have cuts at the start of every transient), go to Actions and type in 'create chromatic midi' in the box.
  
• Click on 'Item: Create chromatic MIDI from items' and run that action.

Alternatively (and possibly faster way of doing it, depending on how good you dynamic split detection is) - skip the tab-to-transient manual slicing part - just set Dynamic split so that it picks up all the hits, check 'Create chromatic MIDI item from slices' in the Dynamic split dialogue box and then click Split. When you are done with converting to midi, just erase mistriggers by hand in the MIDI editor. They should be pretty easy to spot, 'cause most probably they'll have low velocity values.

Any way you do it, you'll end up getting a new MIDI track. Then:

• Double click on that new MIDI track, and now you are in the MIDI editor.
  
• Press Ctrl+A to select all the notes
  
• Press Ctrl+F2 and you'll get a new dialog box. For this step you have to know MIDI numbers of desired drum elements (kick is 36, snare is 38).
  
• If you are for ex. doing this on your kick track, type in 36 in the box, and now all converted hits have the same note value - 36/C2, which is what you want.
  
• Adjust velocities by hand (for metal, you'll most probably want them in the 115-127 range for snare, and something like 123-127 for kicks), and that's it.

Now you are able to trigger samples/VSTi's off your midi track.

I started using Reaper originally just because of this function, but nowadays I find myself using it more and more, especially for drum and bass editing.