How do you balance "humanizing" kick drums but keep them consistent?

[shred101]

I always start with a totally quantized track and then just use reasons random feature to dequantize them until I can just about notice the slight discrepancies. Ill do the same with dynamics with more variation for more intense parts. Run em all through reasons dedigitalizer and sometimes a valve pre to take the edge of the samples a bit.
I think it makes a big difference if you're careful to pick decent samples because I think a really artificial kick/snare sound will draw even more attention to any over-quantization and it ends up just sounding like a really cheap-ass drum machine.

 

[The Unavoidable]

i use 1 sample and i ain't give no shit

+1 and fucking sig'd

 

[El_Gato]

if I use less than 5-6 samples it sounds totally fake/drum-machine-ish to me. I choose samples with tonal variation too. If volume/consistency is a problem, comp/automation and solved.

 

[nwright]

it's not all volume and consistency, there is a slight tonal change if the player hits with varying "volume" (what I'd call velocity or power). The change isn't as noticeable when it's single kick stuff, but most of our songs are 200+bpm with a lot of 16th note (or more) double kick stuff, thus the balancing act between "machine gun" and "tick tock", haha. I think I've got it sorted. Plus, at this stage all I'm, hearing are the drums, the rest of the stuff remains to be tracked. Putting the drums in a full mix and both the slight tonal changes OR the consistency of a single sample may both get masked...Then it'll just be going with which one works best for the music. Just seems like on here most of the time it's timing issues that are so frustrating, but for me it's the other stuff...the timing is practically perfect!

 

[El_Gato]

yep, so that the multisamples, the rest is just finding the balance between elements, if you miss some hits, then, automation or replacing.

IME, it's almost like drum programming, pay attention to every single hit and make changes