Noob question: Drum replacement

[darth_cupboardy]

Hi there,
I'm new to the whole mixing/mastering thing (though i have some experience with tracking guitars/drums etc. ), and i'm going to get some mixing/mastering lessons by my guitar teacher ( professionel sound engineer), because in the next few months i want torecord my bands first demo. But i think this particular question You can answer better.
Well I read alot about drum replacement and i know you can do it with triggers, but after reading through this forum it seems you can also replace drumtracks that were not triggered, with some obscure software (drumagog/aptrigga)
so i did a lot of research in the web and on this forum, but i can't find a source that tells me actually HOW you replace your already recorded Drumtrack, and HOW you use drumagog/aptrigga.
Some help would be highly apreciated.
Because I would like to replace kickdrum and snare with samples from my drummers drumkit to avoid to much bleed from the rest of the kit.
thanks in advance Jan

 

[schust]

hi jan - welcome to the board.

i'll take a stab at this, but i'm sure a few others with more experience will chime in as well.

first off, you're correct that you can use drum replacement software (e.g. drumagog, aptrigga, etc) with either triggered or acoustic drums. drumagog and aptrigga are both very good. both cost some money - with aptrigga being cheaper. i use a free drum replacer in my DAW, Reaper, but the last time i checked - aptrigga was like maybe $30 and drumagog was +150.00.

a few things i've learned that are important up front during the recording phase is to make sure you get good, strong hits from the drums you want to replace. so for example, since you want to replace the kickdrum and snare - you want nice strong signals recording from them to make your life easier on the backend when doing the replacing. you also want to reduce 'bleed' from other pieces of the kit as much as possible to avoid 'false' triggering/replacement as well. a gate will come in handy for this during mix.

all replacement plugs have some kind of threshold and retriggering interval of which you will need to tweak based on the signal strength and how your drummer is playing. simple quarter, eighth and sixteenth notes are pretty easy for any drum replacement plug to sync up on. it gets difficult - and the quality of the plug comes into play - when you start dealing with advanced hits like flams/rolls on the snare or very fast, syncopated stuff on either the kick or snare.

if possible, i'd recommend just make a test recording and play with the plug you choose to do the replacement with before the real deal. it may help quite a bit in the end.

 

[darth_cupboardy]

hey thanks very much...again another thing I've learned from sneapforum
i think i'll try and test aptrigga...because it seems to get good reviews here and it's really cheap compared to drumagog.

 

[Machinated]

You can also do it the "slow" or "classic" way - tab to transient, and paste. I prefer Drumagog personally, tried out aptrigga and it didn't seem as easy to set up. Of course there are loads that take the opposite view too...

 

[006]

Then there's also the fact that anybody can run more instances of apTrigga vs. Drumagog which is a big resource hog.

~006

 

[Machinated]

8 cores baby On that note, I honestly don't have to think about how many and what plugins I'm using - I should really get a screenshot of my mixer, its awesome haha

 

[006]

...unless you have 8 cores Yeah that would be nice to have. At that point you could load as many resource hogs you wanted and it wouldn't even scratch the surface.

~006

 

[Sloan]

Dude, I was messing with triggering in Reaper today. It's pretty easy and there's people writing some plugin scripts (the JS plugs are modifiable) and coming out with great new stuff for drum triggering/replacement. I just wanted to mention this because it's all free.

 

[Russtopher]

I've had good success using Replacer by Boxsounds on snare and kick. I'll blend the sample in underneath the original to just augment the natural drum, so only having 1 sample level isn't an issue for me. Just put it in your FX chain, fiddle a bit with the settings to make sure your kick or snare is all that's being triggered, load up your sample, and away you go.

 

[KeithTidd]

reaper's triggering is pretty easy, and works well. Same with aptrigga. MY experience with drumagog is that it's a deep plug in, but it's not as easy to use as aptrigga.