Evening out natural kicks for sample replacement

[bryan_kilco]

Just wondering how some of you guys go about this.

If I just slap Trigger on the kick track, it works decently but some parts don't trigger properly. I was going to cut the track up onto separate tracks and use 2 instances of Trigger, but decided to do a bit of tweaking to see if I could nail it on just one track.

What I did was: EQ - crazy bump in the lowend and highend to get it cutting, then a transient shaper, then Trigger. Seemed to work pretty well, aside from a few random hits that I just manually cut/pasted a better hit.

Interested to hear how some of ya'll go about this!

 

[Habsburgs]

transient desg > gate/eq > midi > sampler

 

[Trevoire520]

If the drummer has decent technique with his kick playing (no beater bouncing) then I find it pretty easy to get trigger working, especially when using drum triggers and not mic's. Just gotta make sure the retrigger isn't set too low to avoid double triggers.

 

[LeSedna]

I boost the main frequency of what is triggered as well. Like for snares, hi pass a lot so that no kick chimes in, nor lows from the toms, and all that is still there is from the snare basically, so it leaves more room for Trigger to be acurate.

Otherwise, you can use the inherent function of trigger to autodetect bleed mistrigger (for example when the "kick" instance hits the kick, the snare instance of trigger knows it's not meant to be triggered if the kick is bleeding a lot in the snare microphone ).

I'm tired, hope you got what I mean !

 

[greyskull]

I use Massey dtm to generate midi and trigger slate trigger fro
There

 

[bryan_kilco]

Cool info guys, thanks! Yeah I just used mic's as I was limited on inputs and at least wanted the natural sounds to work with, just in case, on this project.

 

[KHE]

are the triggerd sample-hits just to dynamic or do you have misstriggers because of the inconsistent playing?

if the triggerd sample-hits are to dynamic, lower the "dynamics"-knob in trigger.
if you have misstriggers, cut/edit the source-track and automate triggers input-gain.

 

[xTomx]

I generate MIDI so I can go in and control what samples are playing so it sounds more natural.

 

[greyskull]

I generate MIDI so I can go in and control what samples are playing so it sounds more natural.

Hell yeah.

 

[Skinny Viking]

I'd be careful giving a low end bump to try getting Trigger to read the track better

If it has a lot of double bass work the increased low end buildup during those parts can lead to mis-triggers and you'll end up having to go in and remove them manually anyway

 

[Morgan C]

I'd be careful giving a low end bump to try getting Trigger to read the track better

If it has a lot of double bass work the increased low end buildup during those parts can lead to mis-triggers and you'll end up having to go in and remove them manually anyway

Yeah. If anything, totally removing the bottom end from whatever is triggering Trigger will produce better results.

 

[heshian46]

Yea sometimes for triggering kicks a nice method is to remove all low end, and boost the click of the kick drum. This helps get rid of the some of the low end junk that can cause mis-triggering.

Im also a fan of converting to MIDI and triggering from there.

 

[bryan_kilco]

Yeah. If anything, totally removing the bottom end from whatever is triggering Trigger will produce better results.

Thanks!

The boost in the highs definitely helped a LOT. Drummer is pretty consistent but in the really fast double bass parts he got a tiny bit hairy and I just copied a harder hit in where there were mistriggers.

 

[006]

I always do a HP around 150-200Hz, the low end isn't necessary and can actually complicate triggering. Then I do a boost around 8k or so to bring out attack from the beater. After that is a transient shaper (Cubase's built-in one) boosting attack and taking a slight bit of sustain out. Usually that is all I need to get it to work properly with TRIGGER. The last step is recording the MIDI, I like to have total control over what is going on. Essentially how the kick track sounds after all that (before it goes into TRIGGER) is basically how a kick trigger sounds. No low end, all attack.

 

[Revson]

I go through and listen for mistriggers. Anywhere I hear one I automate the threshold in that spot to trigger properly. In some of the faster double-bass parts the drummer starts hitting like a giant pussy and I'll chop out that section and clip gain it up.

 

[bryan_kilco]

Spent a little while last night tweaking another song from my band. This one is a bit rougher. More mistriggers and not as tight of a performance. I'm surprised at how smoothly punching in the drums went! Anyway, I'm going to come back at it today fresh and see if I can make the whole track trigger properly without having to cut it up/use multiple instances of Trigger, or automate anything.

The DETAIL knob.......sort of confuses me sometimes. You want to lower that when Trigger comes across a weaker hit, correct? That's what I've been doing.....Just seems odd that there's the tiniest hit in the middle of nowhere when all his other hits are HUGE.

 

[bassguy]

Convert to midi, then just adjust the velocities to your liking for each hit

 

[TheDustbowl]

I'll eq to remove as much bleed as I can and then if I have problems with ghost hits I'll use an expander followed by a gate to separate them.

Transient shaping can help with triggering but can also screw the timing if you're not careful, you may need to slip your midi track to fit.

I love Trigger but I actually find the transient detection and convert to midi in Cubase 6 to work very well and it gives me the ability to frig if I need to. I'll often then consider to apply a very slight quantize for timing (obviously if you're layering rather than replacing you need to do the same with the audio; you can do this in C6, not sure how easy it is in other DAWs) and and I'll often use a midi compressor to even-out the hits, or do some velocity editing if that's more appropriate.

Truie posted a tutorial on drum part editing on the FOH board last year.

A.

 

[TRUIE]

Truie posted a tutorial on drum part editing on the FOH board last year.

Are you talking about this thread : http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/f-o-h/739500-tutorial-how-humanise-midi-drum-track-cubase.html
It was more about programming drums, but you can still use the logical editor for a lot of other things

You can also use the destructive add / comp-expand / limit velocities on your midi notes, i've got a shortcut key for this function and I use it all the time. I'll post the exact way to grab this function when I'll have the chance.

 

[TheDustbowl]

Hi, yes that was the tutorial I was referring to. I find that thorough editing of midi drum parts isn't much different to programming drums, especially if I'm replacing parts (rather than supplementing them) and want to tighten timing or even-out dynamics for example. I liked the tutorial and it's quite rate to see the (very powerful) logical editor mentioned, hence the reference and it's a nice piece of work.

Take care

Andi