How To Give Drums On Old Demos Some Definition When They Are Muddy Sacks Of Shit...

[Hardrock69]

You gotta have some drum replacement software like Drumagog in order to do this.

First, you load your old demo up into your trusty wave editor, and using eq, delete all frequencies above 70 hz. Possibly everything above 60hz. Depends on how much low end the bass has, vs. how much low end the kick drum has.

You only want the lowest part of the spectrum for kick drums i.e. the 50-70 hz range.

Note that if the bass is down in that spectrum, this trick won't work.

What you just want is a trigger. The only way to tune everything else on the demo out leaving only a kick drum trigger is to remove all that stuff over 60-70 hz.

Then, you choose a good clean kick drum sample with a lotta highs and high mids, so you can get some good snap on the top end and some punch in the mids, and load it into your drum replacement plugin.

You will probably have to adjust your sensitivity and input settings, but hopefully you can get it so the drum replacement plugin will detect the original kick drum hits, and play the sample simultaneously.

Once you do this, and apply the plugin to the track, you will have a track with the new sound of the sampled kick drum.

It will be the same length as the original song of course, so what you do is now save it as something like kickdrumnew.wav.

Now you open up your multi-track program and load the original song on track one, then load the kick drum track you just created which has all kindsa sparkling top end on track two, and then do a mixdown with however much of the new kick drum track you want in the mix.

Figured this out as I am working on an old song where the kick has no definition at all, and I am remastering the song. Just want to spiff it up a bit, that's all.

Figured I would post this piece of info for all you guys out there who might want to make those old demos with Mississippi Mud kick drums sound a bit better.

Cheers.

[Diamondjimi]

Are your drums tracks in multi-track or stereo mixdown?

[Hardrock69]

Stereo mixdown. If they were multi-track, I would only have to eq the kick and remix.

The above tutorial is for people that only have a stereo mixdown, with no way to separate the kick drum from the rest of the instruments.

It is more like adding a kick drum with more highs and mids over the top of the existing kick drum to a certain degree.

[kwame k]

Makes total sense........most drummers keep their kick muddy and in the lower range of the EQ spectrum. When adding bass guitar and other instruments you loose so much of the bass drum sound.

I wish I could find the article about the engineer that used the EQ to fix the drums on a Grateful Dead live album...by using EQ he was able to isolate the major drum parts from the mix using sorta the same technique you did!

I personally like my bass drum to cut through the mix.....use either a wooden batter, or a composite batter of felt and plastic. I use a Remo white-dot patch, dead center to focus the strike, too. I tune my kick head rather tight and leave the front kinda loose.

[Diamondjimi]

The drums you heard on my material were brutal to eq and tweak to get a good sound. It took a lot of work and help from a good friend (a drummer) who was a long time member of a multi- gold and platinum international band. Basically the drummer had a Ludwig Bonzo set up tuned low without any major difference in tuning (rack & floor toms). They sounded "tubby" with no real life to them. He was a stubborn cunt who was set in his ways so there wasn't much use in asking him modify his tuning. So when it came time to track the second album I was faced with the same issues again.
So the solution I found was in a program called Drumtrackerâ„¢. It's made specifically for replacing shitty sounding drums. You simply take a wav. file of the drum you want to replace, load it in the program. It reads the wav. and converts the strikes to MIDI. It also measures attack and velocity in the information. Save the MIDI file, open it in you DAW , run a sampler program as a VST ( I use Battery) and simply assign your replacement sample wav. Then do a mixdown of the file (saved as a wav.) and viola' a brand new kick ass replacement. ( I used samples from Toontracks "Drumkit from Hell)
Now replace the shitty sounding drum in your session with the new one. Done, killer!
This program can also work with a simple stereo mixdown of a kit. It just takes a bit more work but you can switch out a full kit...

Check out the tutorial...

[kwame k]

Posted at the same time Jimi

That's total bullshit that he wouldn't tune for the music........WTF are you doing playing in a band if you refuse to blend with the band?

Fucking drummers

[jhale667]

Great info, guys. DJ's also sent me a tutorial vid on editing drum tracks a while back to make them sound tighter - dude knows his stuff. And HR's replacement method sounds like it'd turn out pretty cool, too.

[Diamondjimi]

Posted at the same time Jimi

That's total bullshit that he wouldn't tune for the music........WTF are you doing playing in a band if you refuse to blend with the band?

Fucking drummers

The guy was a stubborn hump.A real piece of work.... (He's no longer in the band)

Great info, guys. DJ's also sent me a tutorial vid on editing drum tracks a while back to make them sound tighter - dude knows his stuff. And HR's replacement method sounds like it'd turn out pretty cool, too.

Thanks J!
I've also tries Drumagog. It's a pretty straight forward program. And a good one at that. But I did some research and found Drumtracker more suited for my needs.
So for the new album's drums I used a Ludwig snare and kick and Sonor toms. All cymbals closed mic'd, and stereo overheads were kept intact. The difference is incredible!
The samples (Drumkit From Hell) were created in a world class studio using the drummer from Mushugga... Lots of kits to chose from with multiple velocity strike samples for each and every drum in it's library...
I come from the old school of recording, but damn I love living in the technological age!!!

[kwame k]

Before my divorce I was just getting into using triggers on my acoustic kit......blending the mics with the trigged samples. I sampled my own kit and triggered that. Spent hours getting the perfect snare, bass, toms, and cymbal sounds. Oddly, enough....by spending that much time getting it right....my acoustic kit sounded awesome and to save on system resources I hardly ever used the triggers.

Having said that.....having a killer library of samples is the way to go. I can see using triggered samples for live and recording, having a constant reliable sound is worth it's weight in gold.
With the advances in electronic drum kits, especially Roland's kits....really you can get away from using acoustic kits....no mic bleed, sympathy vibrations, no reason to isolate the drums when recording, no volume issues and the like. Problem is the really killer electronic kits still cost about 5 grand +or-.

I agree with Jimi, I'm old school and still think if you can't get a good sound with an acoustic kit, you have no reason being in the business but having the technology sure can save your ass in the studio.

[jhale667]

I agree with both of you actually...I'm so old-school I've been avoiding the idea of using canned (programmed) drums on the CD I'm working on AT ALL, but I'd totally be OK with someone actually PLAYING the parts on a Roland kit and using triggered samples to get a huge-ass drum sound...(I mean, the parts themselves will still have been played by a human, right?) I'm thinking a cross between vintage Bonzo and Tommy Lee's drum sound on the much underrated Crue album w/ John Corabi...holy crap the drums sound MONSTROUS on that disc....

[chefcraig]

I agree with both of you actually...I'm so old-school I've been avoiding the idea of using canned (programmed) drums on the CD I'm working on AT ALL, but I'd totally be OK with someone actually PLAYING the parts on a Roland kit and using triggered samples to get a huge-ass drum sound...

To me, that is the key to the entire recording process. Look, drummers are merely human, so they'll make mistakes, slow down or (more likely) speed up during a song. As a result, if you are playing along to that, be it in a live situation or overdubbing, the music has no other choice but to breathe. Conversely, music set to a perfect, metronomic beat more often than not sounds like it, coming off as purely robotic. Now that's just fucking wonderful if you happen to play in Devo, Kraftwerk or some contrived top 40 radio/club band, but sounds fairly stilted and awkward if you want to sound like the Faces or the Black Crows.

This belief probably goes a long way toward explaining why my stuff sounds by and large old school, closer to a garage band from the sixties than some shiny, synchronized and ultimately soul-free "product" made today. Fuck it, at least I can sleep at night.

[kwame k]

Man...I've said that for years...let the music breathe.....so many drummers can't play to a click without sounding like the....Tick Tock, Tick Tock and like anything else, there's an art to playing to a click. When I map out my recorded drums digitally, you can see that it's not perfect mathematically. Why in the hell would you want it to? If that's the case use a drum machine or trigger to a click.....that's not my idea of Rock n Roll......

Controlling the slop and the old falling down the stairs and landing on your feet maxim is what drumming means to me.......fuck, Bonham was so far behind the beat that he caught up to the previous beat

That's my old timey religion!

[chefcraig]

Look at guys like Bill Ward, who play the song rather than the beat at times. As a result, the added push moves the music in totally unexpected ways, making it ultimately more gratifying when you actually pay attention to what is taking place.

[kwame k]

Spot on, Craig......John Densmore from The Doors same way.....for being a frustrated Jazz drummer, he could follow the ebb and flow of Morrison's vocals and react to it....

Of course the best example of how to completely disregard time is Moon.....Roger pointed out that Moon played his fills to the vocals, which is pounded into a drummer's head to never do.....

That guy.....name one drummer who keeps time like Moon!

[Hardrock69]

Drumtracker is able to create MIDI triggers for the new sample. My method doesn't use that step, but uses the actual hit of the kick as a trigger(obviously ).

The downside of that is, like I pointed out, it is all well and good if you can eliminate the bass guitar from the kick drum, but if the sound of the bass extends below 70hz, it will make it impossible to isolate the kick drum hits. My version is probably pretty crude compared to using Drumtracker, but then, I don't fool with MIDI stuff. I mean, I just use my DAW for audio recording and editing, and that is as far as I go. Old school in that I just always wanted a Studer 24-track 2-inch machine with a nice 46-channel console, and now with Reaper, I have probably got the muscle on my PC for 96 tracks of audio, lol. Though I would have a difficult time filling up 24-tracks.

A new development in my musical world today.

I recorded a flock of demos back in the 90s. Have transferred the final mixes from the master VHS tapes to my hard drive at 24/96 to do a final 'remastering' with some tools and know-how I did not have 8 years ago when I did it the first time.

Some of the mixes are just fine (a very few of them). But a majority of them I am not satisfied with the drum sound. And in many cases the cymbals are so obviously drum machine cymbals it bugs the crap out of me.

Well, a friend of mine has a Tascam 488, the pre-cursor to the 688 which I used to record all these demos on. I made arrangements with him this afternoon to borrow it for a couple of weeks.
All I needed was a Tascam mixer/recorder that could play the 8-track cassette multis directly out and then into my Roland VS-1680. Then I can transfer the 8-track multis into Reaper, and can use the original drum tracks as triggers (I used 4 tracks for drums - kick, snare, toms, cymbal/hi-hat). At least I got fairly good separation by doing it that way.

I already have the original mixes I did to VHS. But I want to remix at least 8 or 9 of the original tunes to get a better drum sound.

So starting late next week I am going to borrow my friend's Tascam, and do the transfers. I will transfer all of the multis, even if I do not remix all of them, just so I will have them in digital format for archival purposes.

And then after that, I will do the actual remixing and mastering.

I always dug the mixes I did and I obviously like the songs I wrote, but as any of you would be with demos that have inferior production, over time you get burned out on listening to the shortcomings of the original mixes.

I am not sure how far I wanna go on remixes. I mean, I can replace the entire damn thing instrument-wise. Should I use Recabinet? Run the Bass through a bass amp emulation plugin?
I think I may do that with the bass, and I am certainly going to replace the drums on some of the tracks, but I think the stuff I can use to tweak the existing guitar tracks will be enough without re-amping anything. I wanna keep the original flavor of the mixes, just want the quality to be better, that's all. I want them to be all they can be.

Some of my mixes are not EVEN static. I am a fan of Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Kramer's work, where they would pan stuff back and forth, trying to make a primitive surround-sound thang happen. I have one instrumental that I will only remaster, as the sound is pretty much fine in the mix. Just wanna do some light eq and compression to punch it up a bit and make it shine.
It has backwards guitar, panning, all kinds of whacked out shit. It's a mix I could never replicate. So I will not even try.

I am lucky I can program drums that don't sound 'soul-free'. Strangely enough, I am a guitarist who is fanatical about great drum sounds.

For my book, the drum sounds that are the most consistently killer in metal/hard rock today are those on ALL of the Rammstein albums. Christoph "Doom" Schneider and their producer have drums on every fucking album that make me drool. ME WANTS THOSE DRUMS!!!

Some of my other favorite albums for drums are (of course) Led Zep IV, Judas Priest 's "British Steel", Mr. Big's second album "Lean On It", and Queensryche's "Operation: Mindcrime".
Somewhere in all my bootlegs I have about 30 minutes of Led Zeps In Through The Out Door - the drum tracks ONLY. You can hear Bonzo's headphone mixes leaking out.

That fucking bastard robbed us all of so much killer drumming in years to come by offing himself with his fucking alcohol problem!

[Hardrock69]

Man, there never will be ANYONE on the planet like Moon. Talk about LARGER THAN LIFE!!!!

He never played the drums. HE FUCKING ATTACKED THEM AND BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THEM!!!!

Hey, that is another thing I have noticed that bugs the crap out of me. I have checked out many collections of drum samples over the past 7 or 8 years, and some of them even boast that they are LOUD drums or whatever. But when I check out the snare samples, it sounds like a fucking little girl tapping on the thing.

I am one of those guys who likes the pistol shot snare. No, I do not want a 'ring', like fuckwad did on Metallica's St. Anger. I like a dry CRACK! that sounds like someone is angry and is whacking the snare! All too often I have checked out some snare samples, hoping to find a killer sample I would love to use, only to come to the conclusion that the drummer who was sampled was a limp-wristed pussy motherfucker.

Another thing I admire is drummers who have a background in jazz. For instance, I saw Mr. Big in the mid-90s in a 2,000-seat ballroom. Afterwards my friends and I hung out with them for awhile, and I told Pat Torpey "You like drummers like Buddy Rich and Max Roach, don't you?" And he said "YEAH!" And I said "I could tell just by watching you play. You base your style around the snare, and as a result, all your rack and cymbal work and your kicks are all just icing on the cake!". He was kinda surprised at that, and said nobody had ever told him that before.

A drummer who has got some kind of jazz background and incorporates it into his style could sit there with nothing but a snare drum and do a 20-minute solo on it and not get boring.

Ian Paice is like that. I saw him in a club playing in Gary Moore's band in Dallas, Texas in 1983. Man, the chance to see him play up close in an intimate setting like that was fucking awesome!

Back in the late 40s and early 50s there were a series of albums released that were billed as "Drum Battles". It was like "Buddy Rich vs. Gene Krupa", and "Max Roach vs. Buddy Rich" and shit like that. Those motherfuckers were the baddest of the bad.

Lastly, these days you have all these idiots that think that speed-metal drummers are the fastest drummers on the planet. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have heard some shit by Cab Calloway's swing band from the early 30s where those motherfuckers would make all other drummers look like they were playing on Quualudes. Swing drummers may not be playing a 4-on-the-floor 78-RPM deal or even 1 and 1 and 1 and 1. These motherfuckers are like 1/32 and 1/32 and 1/32 and 1/32 and 1/32......even though they are not hitting their snare that fast, the speed they are going is fucking as fast as any Slayer tune. Musta been all that old Devil Weed and some Cocaine, lol.

[jhale667]

To me, that is the key to the entire recording process. Look, drummers are merely human, so they'll make mistakes, slow down or (more likely) speed up during a song. As a result, if you are playing along to that, be it in a live situation or overdubbing, the music has no other choice but to breathe. Conversely, music set to a perfect, metronomic beat more often than not sounds like it, coming off as purely robotic. Now that's just fucking wonderful if you happen to play in Devo, Kraftwerk or some contrived top 40 radio/club band, but sounds fairly stilted and awkward if you want to sound like the Faces or the Black Crows.

This belief probably goes a long way toward explaining why my stuff sounds by and large old school, closer to a garage band from the sixties than some shiny, synchronized and ultimately soul-free "product" made today. Fuck it, at least I can sleep at night.

Agree, and even though at this point I'm layering all the guitar parts to a click, I do NOT under any circumstances want the drummer to come in and "robot" to it; it's a frame of reference, y'know?

[kwame k]

Agree, and even though at this point I'm layering all the guitar parts to a click, I do NOT under any circumstances want the drummer to come in and "robot" to it; it's a frame of reference, y'know?

It's a guide, a suggestion and not an absolute!

Why is that so hard to understand for some people.

[jhale667]

It's a guide, a suggestion and not an absolute!

Why is that so hard to understand for some people.

Dunno...and it's not like someone working the way I do is going to put down multiple rhythm tracks tapping my foot to keep time and expect them to sync...

I'll see if I can clean up an some MP3s of a tune or two I did on the ADAT in '02 or so in Pro Tools and post an example of a (gainfully employed professional...lol) drummer playing to a click and still sounding loose IMO....








Edit...

Okay, here ya go....admittedly spent less than an hour cleaning this up, but you get the idea...

http://www.rotharmy.com/forums/showt...=1#post1519420