Recording - April 2011 - 30

B Y PA U L V N U K J R .

Slate Digital Trigger Platinum

It is surprisingly lean and friendly to older computers. I ran five instances of Trigger (about all you should need on a session) on a 5-year old 17" MacBook Pro, as well as on my 21/2-year-old 2.8 GHz PC running Windows XP, and it barely tickled the performance meter! While Trigger runs as an effect plug-in, it is also part virtual instrument. Each instance of Trigger that you launch will be dedicated to the playback of one kit piece like a kick or a snare. Each kit piece can be made up of between 1 to 6 multi-layered, phaseaccurate samples, each with up to 127 articulations and 127 velocity layers. The Slate sounds... or not, if you insist Trigger comes with a 2.3 GB library of 24-bit samples from Steven Slate Drums and includes: 46 snares, including 2 highdetailed Deluxe snares with adjustable overhead mic tracks and 12 alternation hits for each velocity (to follow left vs. right hand strikes, and to prevent the “machinegun” effect from retriggering the same sample over and over again); 33 kick drums (including 2 Deluxe kick drums); and 8 sets of toms. Most close-miked samples are mono, while distant and room sounds are stereo. (By comparison, Trigger EX has 10 snares, 9 kicks, and 3 sets of toms.) While that may not sound like much in today’s landscape of mega-gig drum libraries, Trigger’s samples make use of proprietary lossless compression and actually equal 6 GB of uncompressed data; also keep in mind that these are just snares, toms and kicks, with no hats, rides, crashes or odd percussion. So there’s a lot of articulation data per drum, leading to more realistic results. While these are fantastic sounds, you can also create your own sample sets with the included Trigger Instrument Maker. This is a standalone application in which you load your own favorite or custom samples into 1 to 127 tweakable slots; it will then author your new custom Trigger instrument. Sometimes you’ll have special needs that aren’t covered by a particular drum replacement library; having the option to turn your own libraries into Trigger instruments is a very nice feature. Trigger also acts as a drum trigger, both in the software sense and in the traditional “old school” sense; in addition to its own internal sounds, it can be

Drum replacement for the modern studio
Steven Slate is the man behind the popular Steven Slate Drums line of virtual instruments. The software we’re reviewing today, Trigger from Steven’s Slate Digital brand, is a drum replacement utility that takes advantage of the SSD drum sounds. I reviewed Trigger Platinum, which has a large library of sounds for kick, snare, and tom replacement; a less expensive EX version with a smaller sound selection is also available. What is drum replacement? Virtual-drum instrument programs such Steven Slate Drums Platinum and EX, as well as competitors like FXpansion’s BFD lineup and Toontrack’s DFH, all rely on MIDI programming and pre-made grooves, or grooves played into the computer with a controller like a MIDI drum kit, to create realistic drum tracks for your music productions. That’s not the same thing as drum replacement: Programs like Trigger and WaveMachine Labs’ Drumagog “listen to” real drum tracks that have been recorded, replacing the drum hits on the audio track by triggering sampled drum hits in their place.
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Back in the olden days of recording (circa the ’80s and ’90s), drum replacement was a much more complicated process than it is now. The techniques for drum replacement included hardware noise gates and sampling digital-delay units with a single triggerable drum sample stored in their memories, which then evolved into using clamp-on MIDI triggers or piezo pickups to trigger early drum samplers like the now-classic Wendel Jr. and the early Drumulator drum machines from E-Mu. Fast forward to today, and like many studio processes that were once difficult to agonizing, this procedure can now be handled by a single plug-in within your DAW. What’s in the package Trigger runs as a VST or RTAS plug-in under Windows XP/Vista/7 (32 or 64 bit) or as VST, RTAS, or AU under Mac OS X 10.4+. It needs 1 GB of RAM and 2.4 GB of disk space for the Platinum library sounds. Copy protection is via iLok USB key.

Recording - April 2011

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