Drum Sample Purgatory

Your mission - should you choose to accept it - is to resurrect an old recording. The drummer and lead vocalist are not available to redo their respective tracks and the budget is $1.25. Only an idiot would say yes.

The songs recorded on 16 track tape came back from the studio on a USB drive. The tracks were loaded into software, identified and labelled.

That's when the fun started.

The drums were unusable - they sounded like someone was slapping a wet blanket with a canoe paddle. The heads were worn out and the snare mic was dead on two songs. Obviously the drums needed to be subbed with samples. The overhead mic (AKG c451) tracks were usable and left on. The cymbals sounded quite good. This meant that the drum samples had to be carefully panned to the right spot in the mix to avoid smearing. They also needed to be time aligned to avoid phasing issues.

A sample is triggered when the signal on the chosen track rises to a user adjustable level. The more sensitive the setting the more extraneous noises will trigger the sample. In the case of a snare drum the toms will cause numerous false triggers if the threshold is set too low. If the threshold is set too high ghost notes will be missed and the sample trigger will be delayed. The upshot is that every single drum hit had to be compared to its sample, aligned with the original drum and it`s volume had to be adjusted. This activity sucked up hours and hours of time. After it was finished the drum sounds could be changed on the fly. That was cool.

What wasn`t cool was the reverb on the drum samples.

While mixing it was obvious that most of the new drummer was not in the same room as the rest of the band. The cymbals were, but the rest of the drums were in 3 separate rooms. Crap.

Gating was used to clean up some of the samples` reverb and the overhead mic tracks were left ungated to leave some of the room in the mix. An additional reverb mimicking the original room was applied. The drums on the rest of the songs were waiting.

One song down - a bunch more to go.

This has nothing to do with the text