Today we are going to be discussing my approach to sample replacement on drums. Now sample replacement is usually something I try to avoid because to me it strips the drums of their natural vibe. Sample replacing the kick and snare diminishes the contribution of the drummer to the track. They put their talent and skill to work on the track and played each part a certain way at a certain volume and velocity to make the track feel a certain way. When you replace those parts with a sample it’s very difficult to retain that if you can at all.
But, there is a place for sample replacement. For me it’s a last resort and on this track here today, it was absolutely necessary. The snare drum on this track just wasn’t cutting it at all. It seemed like there was an issue with the microphone during recording as the snare cut out a couple times as well as varied in capture. In addition there was tons of hi hat bleed to the point where it seemed more like a hi hat mic than a snare mic. At this point the snare needs to be replaced.
Now there are a variety of ways to go about drum replacement, but my favorite is by using a sample created from the current kit. What I mean by this os that you grab a snare hit from the song that sounds as best as it can under the circumstances and you edit it to be just the snare hit. So I tab to transient to cut at the beginning, fade out the bleed on the end and boom, we have ourselves a snare sample that fits perfectly with the live recorded drums.
Now comes the utterly tedious job of pasting that sample in. I’m sure there are faster ways of doing this but my favorite at the moment is still by hand. So what I do is I start at the beginning of the track on the live snare and I tab to transient. Then I simple click down to the sample track and paste the snare sample. This lines up the transients of our live snare and our sample so they will be in phase with each other and the rest of the kit. Then I click back up, tab to the next transient and rinse and repeat until I’ve pasted in all the samples.
The only thing I don’t paste in is snare fills and rolls. I like to keep these natural and live, so I simply copy these down from the live snare and fade them in and out to reduce the bleed on either end. What we end up with this way is a more dependable snare drum with the vibe and character of the drummer preserved through their fills.
It’s definitely my favorite way to sample replace drums and to me it is the most natural sounding result.
Check out the video at the top of the post and don’t forget to grab your FREE copy of my Essential Guide To Recording Snare Drum so next time you won’t have to use samples.
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