How do you work with drum samples?

[brandondrury]

The project I'm producing right now (the country, pop, rock thing) is supposed to sound relatively natural (at least as natural as any other modern song in that genre). So I'm thinking that we are going to get the sampled drums as perfect as possible (perfect meaning as natural sounding and human feeling as possible). Then once we are happy with that, I'm planning on rendering drum tracks down to seperate wave files and then approaching the rest of the tracking process like I would with any other band in the studio.

I want to commit the drums to "tape" so to speak and deal with any issues that come up in tracking like we would have to if we had tracked the drums in a big room with a Neve.

It looks like all overdubs are going to be done the old fashioned way with mic'd guitars, DI'd bass (unless I can get what I want with midi bass), and vocals.

Does this way of working seam sensible? I want to avoid quantizing and all that type of shit. I've found that quantizing is not nearly as useful as I thought it would be (although it has it's moments). I just want the recording to sound like a type modern band...and not as mechnical as the midi stuff can be.

I also like the idea of committing. I want to force myself to work with the tracks I have. I don't want to be second guessing the drums. They are what they are.

Brandon

[dach]

there are a million variations on how to do it... but that's a very good start... you may need to alter your process depending on how the song was written and/or the song itself... but you are definitely on the right track...

you "may" need to go back after you've recorded everything else and do some things to the drums, then re-render... to make it even better/tighter/realistic/fill holes or whatever... all the planning and foresight in the world goes out the door when working on an "overdub" project...

one thing is for sure... you can sure plan on moving some faders!

Once you get this whole process down, and are used to creating this way right up to the mix... then you'll start to develop some different mix strategies and tricks to make things better...

have fun!

[brandondrury]

there are a million variations on how to do it... but that's a very good start...

Woo hoo! I've gotten the hard ass to give in. .... I'm finally doing something right!!!


Yeah, the idea is to commit to drums, but it's not like I'm going to burn the midi files. If the song clearly needs something done differently to make it better, than we do it. That's no big deal. I'm just excited about turning the midi chunk off and mixing a song like I'm used to.

Brandon

[scopeboy]

I think that's a good way of working. Personally I find that synths and samplers give you so many options, it's easy to get totally confused and lost. Technology gives you so many options nowadays, I realised you have to impose limitations on yourself to get anything done. Analog gear used to do the limitations for you.

I used to just get confused and lost, but since I started live recording, I found it really helps clear my head if I treat all my synths, plugins, or whatever noise making devices I use in my electronic projects, like they were a bunch of real musicians sitting next door in a live room.

So I'll start with programming sessions where I mess around with shuffling MIDI notes and tweaking patches on synths. I pretend that my robot band is jamming together and songwriting. Once I'm happy with the "Song", I'll draw a line under it, and I won't change any MIDI or synth settings unless I notice something really bad later.

So now my robot band have a good song written and loads of practice. They're all ready to go into the studio for tracking. Ideally I would get the raw sound of each synth down to its own track (or two if it's a stereo unit) and then I mix and edit them just as if they were real guys that I recorded with mics. If I'm playing anything live, I'll track myself at this point too.

This is basically just what Brandon proposed doing with the drums. Of course, the cool thing is, this is just a metaphor. You can leave the drum sampler playing MIDI the whole time right till the bitter end of the mixing, rather than printing the outputs of your "Drum mics" to WAV files. But if you pretend that you "Tracked" them, it clears your mind and you're not tempted to go back in the middle of mixing and move that sampled snare hit by 10 milliseconds just because you can, and then waste an hour looping it and agonising over whether it was better where it was. You already drew a line under that in the "Tracking session", so you can forget it and keep the work flowing.

steve