Recording - April 2011 - 31

assigned to trigger MIDI notes to play your hardware or software sample players. (You can also use it as a sound module of sorts, playing its internal sounds from external MIDI information.) Trigger has a built-in gate/ducker, since that’s how it operates; you feed your drum track through it, and when it detects a hit that’s louder than a certain threshold, it ducks (effectively mutes) the audio track and plays back its own samples to replace the audio it’s listening to. A guided tour Trigger opens as a simple and elegant single windowed interface. It contains a left justified browser for selecting both individual samples as well as saved instrument sets. Just below the browser is a parameter that allows you to constrain your chosen samples to just the hard hits, the soft, the side sticked (for snares), or all.

Mono and stereo replacement... without bloodshed Trigger works slightly differently for mono and stereo tracks. For mono tracks (like kick drum), it’s best to run Trigger as an insert plug-in on the instrument track itself. You adjust the input volume (with the waveform display), sensitivity (by ear) and detail (with an on-screen visual aid, two threshold bars), until the samples trigger naturally to your ears. As you adjust the retrigger value, you will notice parts of the blue waveform turn red. This setting tells the program not to sound again until a specified number of milliseconds have passed. The red part of the wave shows you visually what part of your ghost notes and bleed will not sound. Bleed is your biggest enemy in the world of drum replacement. Whether it’s the bleed of the snare into the kick mic, or from the kick and hats into the snare mic, etc., these

Effective use Trigger is best summed up as a simple program that does complex things. It can do its job right out of the box with little to no initial tweaking, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never have random ghost notes, flams, or missed triggers. When you run into those artifacts, you need to develop some finesse with it—it will take you a while to figure out how and when to suppress, how much highpass filtering to apply, how much retriggering is appropriate, and so on. Trigger’s success also depends on how well your initial drum takes were played, especially with regard to dynamics and timing tightness—the more consistency, the better. Lastly, sample choice is key for maximum believability! Take the time to audition the length and breadth of Trigger’s library to find what will sit comfortably in your track... especially since no matter

With Trigger in your DAW, you can produce better-sounding drum tracks more quickly and easily... and you can sit back and laugh about how drum replacement used to be done.
Above the browser is a Settings button which launches Trigger’s only alternate window. That’s where all MIDI parameters as well as instrument paths are set, and it is also here where you can choose between two detection modes: Live and Accurate. Live mode is for using Trigger in real time with near zero latency; Accurate mode is just that, but increases latency to around 11 ms, which if your DAW has delay compensation should not be a problem. The rest of Trigger’s GUI can be broken into three related sections. • The triggering section offers controls for track input and output, sensitivity, retrigger and detail. • The instrument controls are where you load up and adjust your samples. Each sample has individual control of volume, panning, solo, mute, phase, velocity, and dynamics, as well as a section for setting the attack, sustain and release of each sample. • Lastly there is a main waveform display, complete with full input and output metering and clip detection. The waveform display lets you watch audio as it plays through Trigger. It’s interactive, and it changes color to reflect changes in behavior as you adjust its parameters. Blue is the color of the waveform as it plays through the plug-in, turning red in places where you have made adjustments for items like retriggering, and for bleed hits that the program is to ignore. Other features in the display include a highpass filter, overall mix (original vs. the triggered samples), and a suppression control. extra notes can cause a cacophony of extra hits on your chosen drum channel. You have to tell Trigger not to play when it hears them, and Trigger gives you a lot of help. Besides retrigger time and sensitivity threshold settings, the highpass filter is useful for lessening the interfering rumble of low kick hits in snare tracks (for example). There is also a powerful proprietary function called Leakage Suppression... and this brings us to working with stereo tracks. When you’re working with snare sounds, which are the most prone to bleed since the snare is so close to the kick, rack toms, and hi-hat, it’s best to run Trigger on a stereo track. This lets you apply Leakage Suppression, and also lets you bring in the sample library’s stereo room mic samples. Depending on your DAW, you’ll want to use either a stereo aux send or a stereo group bus into which you route your source audio. Into this stereo aux or group bus, you send the audio source you’re replacing (e.g. the snare) to the left side, and the tracks you’re trying to suppress (e.g. the hi-hat, toms, and/or kicks) to the right side. Naturally, if you’re using Trigger to clean up the kick and tom tracks themselves, you don’t want to use your cleaned-up kick/tom tracks to try and fix the bleed problems in the snare track! So keep a copy of the “unreplaced” kick and toms just for this purpose. Now, when you play back the tracks, you’ll see the “good” snare hits that will be replaced by Trigger in blue, and the ghost notes and bleed you’re suppressing in red. what, there will most likely be some overall drum bleed from your cymbal and room mics. The trick here is to end up with a track that doesn’t make the listener aware that you replaced the drums. Blending Trigger’s samples with the originals rather than replacing them completely will often sound the most natural. Wrap up I will admit Trigger is the first piece of end-to-end drum replacement software I have ever used. I have replaced drums many times before, but most of the time it has been by laying samples or MIDI notes in by hand, and I did cut my teeth on the old-school sampler/gate method. Trigger renders these methods obsolete, and no one could be happier about this than me! I’m still getting the hang of “finessing” Trigger as I discussed above, but I can tell Trigger will continue to be a very useful piece of kit in my studio’s arsenal. To see if Trigger is for you, Slate Digital offers a number of instructional videos on its website; even better, download a demo version and give it a try. One thing’s for sure, with Trigger in your DAW, you can produce better-sounding drum tracks more quickly and easily... and you can sit back and laugh about how drum replacement used to be done. Prices: Trigger Platinum, $299; Trigger EX $129 Download from: Slate Digital, www.slatedigital.com.
RECORDING APRIL 2011

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Recording - April 2011

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