Drum Triggering and Processing the Drum sounds for APOLLO.

This trimester, as those who have been following would know, I’ve had a strong focus on recording and processing a live drum kit. I have been after a particular sound for my drums in for my project and have been wanting a very clean, processed sounding drum kit. I was initially after the drum sounds that can be heard in tracks like I Can Talk by Two Door Cinema Club or CIA by New Politics, even though I’ve posted them here a few times I’ll give them another link just for those who need a refresher or are a new reader.

The way that the drum recording went was, we did the standard recording practice where I'd get the best take I can for each section, but what was different was at the end of the session I made sure to record a couple of one-shot hits of each element of the drums for me to use later in the mix. The reason I did this is because if we listen to the songs above they have essentially the exact same kick and snare on every hit, as a sample is being played on each kick and snare hit instead of the original one. The velocity at which a drummer hits lets say a kick or snare will change each time as it is a human performance and there is going to be variations of how hard each element is being hit, however if we listen to the references it sounds perfect and the same on each hit. A very popular way this can be done is by using a method called Drum Triggering, which I discovered through some of my peers at SAE. I wrote a little bit about triggering in one of my earlier blogs where I described it as:

"Triggering essentially takes the transients of each drum hit and replaces it with a new sample, so instead of a lets say kick drum sounding different in tonality due to the variation of how it's being hit, it replaces it with the same sample each time to give it a more even sound. These can then be manipulated so that each transient hits at the exact same volume and velocity, giving it a very solid sound, this is a technique that is often used in metal and is what gives off that powerful drum sound"

Sound On Sound magazine says that “Typically, in genres such as indie or soul, much of the feel of the performance is likely to come from nuances in the way the drums have been hit — so you can use drum replacement in those genres, but your result will usually need to be more natural and less obtrusive, and to take much more account of the dynamics of the performance, than in 'harder' styles - Triggering is crucially important in rock and metal production, for instance, where the feel of a track will often rely on a sense of consistency between one strike and the next. Sixteenths played by a real drummer on the bass drum at 240bpm will inevitably suffer from a dulled attack, but with total sample replacement each bass drum strike can be as solid as the last.” (Dunkley & Houghton, 2011) The natural feel approach to drums is basically the opposite of what I’m trying to do in this project.

Drum Triggering is originally actually a type of physical transducer that can be placed on an element of a drum which sends a signal each time the drum is hit and then that ‘triggers’ a sample to play whenever that element of the drum is hit. Triggering in a digital sense does basically the same thing but instead of a physical transducer, it detects the transient as a drum hit and triggers a sample from there. Upon researching this, I found that there are a few different plugins that can do this, such as Drumagog 5, Toontrack Superior Drummer, or one that seems to be very popular with many people, Slate Digital’s ‘Trigger 2’. (Dunkley & Houghton, 2011)

I had a mess around with Trigger 2 as we have access to the plugin in the studios at SAE, and after getting the hang of how it all works I really liked it.

("TRIGGER 2 - The Pro's Secret To HUGE Drums", 2018)

Here’s a quick look at how some drums that have been recorded rather poorly can be transformed into huge drums by swapping out the original sounds with samples that come with Trigger 2 ("TRIGGER 2 - The Pro's Secret To HUGE Drums", 2018). For my project, I wanted not only something that sounded the same on each hit, but I also wanted the hits to be very on time with the rest of the song. To do this I decided I would use beat detective to kind of lock the drum hits very close to the grid, and then replace these hits with steven slate trigger to give it a big, consistent sound.

As I had a big focus on drum recording this trimester, It didn’t really make sense for me to go through the effort of fully recording a drum kit and then swap all of the drums for third party samples as I could have just recorded any type of drum sound that has a transient without worrying about the quality. To counteract this and still showcase my learning of recording drums, I decided to take each of the one shots from the end of the recording, process these and then create my own originally recorded, ‘perfect’ drum sample to load into Trigger.

PROCESSING MY DRUM SAMPLES.

First, I picked out and and cropped the best kick and snare hit from the one shot recording and consolidated these into their own sample so I could begin applying processing to them using Ableton. The kick was a bit more complicated to do as the 'Kick In' didn’t sound as great as I wanted to and was missing a bit of an impact and sounding more like a low sub kind of sound rather than a kick, to mitigate this I balanced the levels of the kick in with the kick out (to be honest, the kick in was turned down pretty low) and created more of a thin, sounding sample with a heavy emphasis on the kick out.

The first thing I did to the kick was to EQ some of the ‘airy’ noise sound that I was hearing in the sample, it sounded a bit like white noise or someone blowing air out of their mouth, I tried to find the right frequencies where this was notched this out with the standard 8 band EQ on Ableton.

I didn’t really know how to go about this besides the standard EQ'ing and compressing that I normally do on things so I used some of the plugins that I have from the Waves collection to help me get the sound that I was after.

("Mixing Drums with Waves - Webinar with Yoad Nevo", 2013)

When doing vocals, my first go to plugin is usually the CLA-Vocals plugin by Waves - I also have a CLA-Drums plugin, so I figured this would be a good starting point, much like CLA-Vocals. I found that I really enjoy this plugin and can see myself using it on drums in the future. I also tried out the E-Kramer Drums plugin by Waves as I remember reading about a classmate of mine, Alice’s blog where she used it for her drums and found success in it (Headlam, 2018). I didn’t find this to really work for my drums so I decided not to use it and opted for the CLA-Drums as an alternative. I found that CLA-Drums allowed me to get much more high end and a bit of a ‘click’ to the kick drum which helped to give a more established transient sound. I then used the CLA-76 compressor, which I used a quick attack and long release for, allowing the kick to have more of a pop type sound, resonating less in the super high frequencies and but rather in the upper mid. To be honest, although it’s mostly frowned upon, when dealing with this many plugins (the waves collection has A LOT of plugins) I often use the built in presets and then I tweak this to fit the sound a bit better, this is a way for me to determine if the plugin has the right sound I’m going for as I can try out some of the different presets and see if there is one that fits what I’m trying to do. I only really do this on compressors as I still have a bit of trouble fully understanding how and when to use one, so I find it a bit easier to learn this way - I’ve also learnt all of my original synthesis by starting off using presets and altering them.

Then there is the H-comp plugin, which is another type of compressor that’s really giving the Kick it’s punch and body sound. I’ve started with the “Drums Punch” preset and changed some parameters around to make it sound really punchy, including turning the threshold down and the output up quite a bit. I’d say this is the star of making the kick go from something a bit thin sounding to something really full sounding. The final piece of compression on the kick drum is the API-2500 which gives a very subtle but more of a resonant pop to the kick which makes it sound a bit tighter, rather than the airy sound that we started off with.

In the end I wanted to bring back in some of the low end sound of the kick that I took out with the Kick-in. I used a third party acoustic drum sample that had a lot more of a low end emphasis, and layered this underneath my kick drum sample. I didn’t want to make this too loud as I wanted to have more of my original work in the track, so it was more of an underlying layer which helped to give it more punch. This was a kick used from the KSHMR sample pack which I tend to use in most of my pop style productions.

UNIQUE ROUTING:

After spending way too much time trying to beat detective my drums to be on sync with the rest of the electronic track I decided to try out a different approach. By using beat detective it ended up sounding kind of weird as I was still keeping some of the swing of the drums but it was synced in other areas and it sounded overall a bit glitchy and like the whole swing of the track was thrown off. I had followed a tutorial for this kind of method of using beat detective which you can watch below to see in more detail.

("Pro Tools: How To Edit Track Groups Using Beat Detective | WinkSound", 2012)

This is the process I was taking to attempt to synchronise my drums. This is a really good method of using the beat detective tool and Its very likely i’ll try it like this again in the future however for this track it just wasn’t really working.

I ended up not doing any drum triggering on the track at all but instead tried another more unconventional approach to doing the drums which involves some more complicated routing within Ableton to get it to work.

I mentioned in an earlier blog that for the scratch track of this project I had been using drum samples sequenced and laid out on the grid, instead of a live drum kit as I was going to record live drums over the top of it. I decided to go back to using the original idea where the drums are sequenced on the grid however I replaced the scratch drum samples with my new, recorded and processed drum samples that had been bounced out from my drum processing session. I still wanted some of the live feel in the track, and we had already spent the time getting perfect takes, so I decided to only use a sequenced kick and snare sample and bounce the stems of all of the other elements in the recording (hat, crash, ride, overheads) and have these as live recording over the top of the sequenced kick and snare.

The issue from here was that I recorded the drums with the original kick and snare still being played, so even though I had removed the recorded kick and snare stems you could still here it bleeding into other microphones such as the overheads (As the hats and overheads didn’t fit the sampled kick and snare perfectly). I decided to get creative with some sidechain compression routing to remove the bleed of the recorded kick and snare from the stems. I was able to apply 2 sidechain compressors to all of the other tracks and by using a low threshold setting I could essentially have it so that the kick and snare bleed were cut out each time their processed artificial replacement was triggered on the sequencer. A couple of times you can hear a little bit of a transient of the recorded kick or snare bleed come through but by the time it's layered with everything else I think this just sounds a bit like a sway off of the grid which I believe helps to establish the human sound back into it. I then bounced the sidechained overheads out into their own stems so that I wasn’t dealing with 2 sidechaining compressors on each element on top of everything else I was going to put on it in the mixing stages. This is a bit complex but I'll drop a screenshot below of how this looks within the DAW. The blue tracks are the samples that are digitally sequenced onto the grid and the red tracks are the live recorded stems. The red tracks have sidechained compressors on them which are sourced from the blue tracks.

That’s basically some of the more unique things that I did to achieve the drum sound that I was after for this project, I'm super happy with the end result of the drum sound but there are still some things I'd change next time. I'd like to try out some different microphones to get the best possible drum sound that I can without processing and know for sure how I'm going to be recording my drums next time so that I don't have to use sidechain as a way to correct a change in creative choice.

Thanks for reading!

References Dunkley, J., & Houghton, M. (2011). Replacing & Reinforcing Recorded Drums. Retrieved from https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/replacing-reinforcing-recorded-drums

Headlam, A. (2018). Mixing Research and Implementing Feedback. Retrieved from https://10127633.wixsite.com/aliceheadlam/home/mixing-research-and-processing-feedback

Mixing Drums with Waves - Webinar with Yoad Nevo. (2013). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqOfvdjiIa8

Pro Tools: How To Edit Track Groups Using Beat Detective | WinkSound. (2012). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InepnduuzUE&

TRIGGER 2 - The Pro's Secret To HUGE Drums. (2018). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/kKq557bbZtw?t=22

TRIGGER 2 - The Pro's Secret To HUGE Drums. (2018). Retrieved from https://youtu.be/kKq557bbZtw?t=22