Drum replacement

This week at Flipside we've been mixing the Charmers 5 track EP (check out our blog entry on the recording here). As with any full band set up we began editing the drums/percussion first. In this session we chose to edit the drum takes while tracking which meant that we were able to record the rest of the instruments on an already tightened drum take. Whats left for us to do is the sound replacement...



Replacing the Snare

After the drums were tracked, we got the drummer to record single hits at 7 different velocities  on the snare. We had recordings on the snare top, snare bottom, room and overhead mics. This meant that we had individual samples we could use to multisample and drum replace. We then loaded up one of our favourite drum sample replacement processors : Drumagog.

Drumagog is a plugin used to replace and enhance drum tracks by using samples. It works similar to a compressor as when a velocity threshold is reached Drumagog will add in a sampled drum sound, the engineer can then control the ratio of the sampled sound to the original.

As with recording any drum kit there is an issue of spill over microphones, in this case the snare mics were picking up the sound of the high-hat. One solution is to use EQ to cut the frequencies of the high hat spill, however this compromises the snare sound to some degree.

Instead, Nath used the individual hits previously recorded and inserted them into Drumagog to use as samples. Then by replacing the original snare sound with the sampled snare, the high-hat spill is eliminated, enabling the boost of higher end frequencies and full control over the snare sound. By replacing the snare we were able to keep the snare at a constant level while also using samples with higher velocity within the chorus.

Hear the samples here of the Snare not Replaced https://www.dropbox.com/s/tj0m6fdro59272d/Drums%20With%20No%20Sample.mp3

and with the Snare Replacement
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jah9baej3aahpo3/Drums%20With%20Sample.mp3


Screen shot 1. of Drumagog 5 in action

Screen shot 2. of Drumagog 5 in action