Daily Blog - April 26th 2021

If you want authentic, "real" sounding drums but your recording needs a little help to sound consistent, punchy and professional (very common, especially with DIY-productions), you should record your own drum samples in the beginning of the session.

Here's how:

Once the kit is tuned and ready, record multiple soft, medium and hard hits, rimshots, flams, different articulations etc. (whatever you use in the song) of every piece of the kit, using all of the mics (including overheads, room mics, etc).

Those serve as a tuning reference throughout the recording process, you can replace weird hits in an otherwise great take and you can create your own dynamic, multi-velocity samples that you can reinforce your recording with instead of using sample packs that might sound fake and might not blend well.

I found Slate Trigger + their included Instrument Editor to be the best tools for that. 

Follow These Steps:

1. Cut out a couple of soft to hard hits (trim the beginning as close to the hit as possible)
2. Do it for top & bottom mic (snare), in & out mics (kick), overhead & room mic pairs separately, so you have more control later
3. Drag and drop them into Slate Instrument Editor. Use multiple samples per velocity layer for ultimate realism.
4. Create and export one tci file per mic/pair
5. Put Slate Trigger on (an) Aux track(s)
6. Load your tci(s) in Trigger
7. Send signal to trigger that you want to reinforce (or for foll control generate MIDI and send that to Trigger)
8. Blend to taste and enjoy your own samples that will match the kit perfectly and sound 100% unique and authentic

-Benedikt

PS: You'll also find these quick tips in my Instagram Stories: @benedikthain