Lasse Lammert
HCAF Blitzkrieg
yep, doing that all the time...the z1/z3 normally sound either too dull or too dead for my taste...tbh I hardly ever use them, I usually prefer using the kit's real snare and when I blend in a sample I just go with some of the standards (D4 has got two or three real good ones....have a listen and you'll hear the favourite ones of Colin R. and Andy pretty easily I guess
).doesn't mean the slate samples don't sound good of course, I'm just not a big fan tbh.
if possible use the kit's own sounds and when I need a blender I'm totally fine with the D4 stuff and some Clearmountain etc.
of course those won't really work by themselves for programmed drums etc because there're not enough velocities/samples, but it's totally fine if you just blend them with the kit's own sounds I think....I usually NEVER work work programmed drums anyway...Forced Evo might have been the first time actually that I had to mix programmed drums.
what I also sometimes do with the Slate Z4 is HP/LP them to get a strong and punchy midrange, compress the fuck out of them and send them to the snarebus, then I'll slightly compress the whole drumbus and but a gate on it, sidechained by a time-advanced trigger track (this is actually the second gate, I have a tightly set one (also keyed by tr) on the mic tracks before I send them to the buss...sometimes even a 3rd one on the bottomsnare keys by the top-mic.......anyway, back to the gate on the drumbus....I'll have a longer hold/release on that one...like 200-500ms, so it's actually like a gated reverb, but I alsways set the release so it's long enough to bridge the gap to the next hit so it doesn't really has this gated reverb effect but is like a highly compressed room,....just less cloudy than if it would go all the way through the whole track.....I often do that as well though....depends.
anyway, you can get cool results with the Z4, especially if the original drums were recorded in a poorly sounding room.
