raw drums and EXTREME comp/EQ'ing

[bryan_kilco]

So, processed drums have to start from raw drums.

Last night I was messing with compressing and EQ'ing raw samples I took of our drummers kit. Like 2 instances of EQ with pretty extreme cuts and boosts and 2 compressors with extreme ratio, GR, etc. Just to see how I could shape these sounds.

I get a cool "CRACK" and less ring on the snare with comp settings of like attack: 15ms, release 280 ms, ratio of 8:0 and GR under -6dB. Then another comp with attack and release higher, smaller ratio, and about the same GR.

And EQ-wise, there are some HUGE boosts in the kicks high end to get some click. I'm talking one EQ with 9db boost and another with 12. But chain is EQ - comp - EQ comp so I'm trying to tame the madness in between.

Should I even be considering taking this approach to make the raw tracks sound better? Or am I only going to do harm?

 

[Habsburgs]

how do they sound in the mix? a "huge" snare could sound really small in the mix.

 

[bryan_kilco]

Well, I don't have a mix yet. Just took samples and was tweaking them. Nothing else is recorded. I know what you mean though.

And something really weird has been going on with this forum. Some of the words in my posts are just randomly cut out, but they show up in quotes and edit window. Wtf?!

EDIT: Pretty sure it's something to do with AdBlock. Very weird. Everything was fine for the past week or 2 since I got this computer.... =/

 

[mva801]

Yeah I've noticed weird stuff too. Random words in people's posts are hyperlinked, to advertisements. Is that only happening to me? Like "start" in your OP is linked to a bullshit college search advertisement? WTF????

 

[bryan_kilco]

Yeah I've noticed weird stuff too. Random words in people's posts are hyperlinked, to advertisements. Is that only happening to me? Like "start" in your OP is linked to a bullshit college search advertisement? WTF????

You running Chrome?

If so, I fixed the problem by going into options and "Extensions".

There is some fucking thing called "Lyric Words" or something like that and I had previously disabled all these bullshit extensions but somehow they re-activated themselves. Deleted it and the problem went away. Yeah, the word "start" in the OP would get picked up by AdBlock and just disappear after the page loaded.

 

[jval]

If you tried that amount of processing on live drum tracks, it probably wouldn't work, especially for snare and toms. Too much bleed and inconsistency of hits. This is exactly why samples are so useful.. no bleed, process it as much as you want!

 

[bryan_kilco]

If you tried that amount of processing on live drum tracks, it probably wouldn't work, especially for snare and toms. Too much bleed and inconsistency of hits. This is exactly why samples are so useful.. no bleed, process it as much as you want!

I'm finding this out.

I do have too much bleed especially kick bleed in the tom tracks.

What I've been doing is converting kick and snare to midi and triggering samples using SSD. I'm not slip editing every single hit to the grid and trying to avoid doing crazy editing. But, now with the bleed in my toms and (slightly) OH's, I get a flamming effect with the kick drum. I can't HP or low shelve the tom tracks enough to remove the kick without the toms sounding super thin.

I took samples so I may have to resort to using those. I'm just not sure how to assign multiple samples inside SSD Essentials without all the samples being played at once.

 

[Melb_shredder]

Most people will strip the toms to silence when they aren't being played. That's what I do!

 

[bryan_kilco]

Most people will strip the toms to silence when they aren't being played. That's what I do!

That's what I usually do as well.

I think I got more bleed this time since I mic'd the toms on less of an angle and tried coming more across the top of the skins.

Does anyone know if there's a way to assign velocities to samples that you load into SSD? It seems as I can load a bunch of samples, but it appears they would all "play" at the same time instead of being able to assign either random hard hits or velocity sensitive hits.