Recording - January 2016 - 36

his excellent team have already done
most of your work for you.
Toontrack's Superior Drummer is also
a fantastic choice-it offers a virtual
instrument that is incredibly tweakable,
easy to use, and offers awesome tones.
What I find with Superior Drummer is
that you can get really hands-on; you're
able to make your programming and
tones exactly what you need them to be.
This makes sense if you are coming from
the studio world, where you are used to
building your tones literally piece by
piece. If you are like me and want to
spend time being creative and original,
you can find your own unique drum
sounds here in spades.
I'd also like to quickly mention
Analogue Drums, a lesser-known company from New Zealand whose sounds I
absolutely adore. If you have never heard
of them, then shame on you. Where
Analogue Drums shines is in tone and
realism. The team has done an amazing
job of putting great-sounding drums at
your fingertips, using great rooms, vintage Neve consoles, and hardware such
as the ADR Compex F760 and dbx 160
VU. The caveat to using their samples is
that you need Native Instrument's Kontakt
(not the free player) or Slate Trigger 2.0
to trigger the samples.
While there are many more great
companies and products worth mentioning, those are what I personally know,
use, and can vouch for. I recommend
each for what it can offer and as I said
before, each brings something unique to
the table.
Now let's go through an example of
my typical workflow, so you can see
how I take samples and get them happening in a track.
The recipe
I program my beats and parts in
Addictive Drums using a preset called
"B.I.G OH and Room", as shown in
Figure 1. This gives me the perspective
of being in a studio or room standing
next to a drummer, writing the song and
arrangement. I heavily tweak this preset
within Addictive's production window
and dial in an honest believable room
sound. I next mix in the overheads, as
overheads are the drums' most important
sonic footprint. So, my initial Addictive
sound is only ambient mics, not close
mics for (say) kick and snare.
36

RECORDING January 2016

In my DAW insert, I use the Universal Audio Helios 69 EQ to sculpt the tones a bit,
and then feed that into the beastly Boz Labs +10db compressor (Figure 2, page 33).
This basic signal path is not too far removed from what I would imagine Andy Johns
was looking at in his mobile recording studio outside Headley Grange, when he
recorded the greatest rock n' roll drum intro of all time-"When the Levee Breaks."
From there I print a stem of what I am getting at about -18 dBFS and move on to
the next virtual instrument. What I am looking to do now is get the specific tones I
want for the music I'm working on. Here I will work within Analogue, Slate, or
Superior to find those sounds.
If it's modern and radio-friendly, perhaps I will reach for Slate's Chris Lord-Alge
pack of samples. On the other hand, if I want drums of thunder, I could reach for
Analogue's Plastique. Maybe I want to annihilate with some straight evilness using
Joe Barresi's samples on Superior. As I said before, we are so lucky to have the
option to effortlessly choose which famous engineer's drum style and tones we can
use within our own music productions.
Once I have what I am looking for tonewise, I will bounce out each piece of the
kit to individual tracks within my DAW, which is Pro Tools. I will have mono audio
tracks of the kick in, kick out, snare top, snare bottom, rack tom, floor tom 1 and 2,
hat, ride and a mono room sound. Then I will have stereo audio tracks of my overhead and room sounds. Usually all together I have about 14 total tracks, including
my Addictive overhead and room blend from before.

Programmed drums, when done well,
can be every bit as good as acoustic drums
that were traditionally tracked in a studio.
Now the sonic mangling truly begins-this is the part that gets me most excited
about sampled drum production! I run each track through a chain of Universal Audio's
Studer tape plug-in and Slate Digital's VCC plug-in. (Figure 3, page 34) My preferred
settings are the Studer at 15 ips CCIR, and Slate at BritN, which is the emulation of a
Neve 8048 console. This is when my samples truly begin to come to life and lose their
sterile qualities. The Studer/VCC chain gives them analog warmth, harmonics, bottom,
and low mids, plus a more 3-D quality. I then print the processed tracks to save processing power and room on my DAW's inserts area. Printing also gives me the chance
to listen carefully and make sure the tracks are sounding how I want. (Figure 4, above)
After I have my 14 tracks printed, I check the phase against the overheads track.
This part is crucial! It will be the difference between having to add a lot of bottom
end to the tracks during mixing vs. already having enough. I always check phase
while wearing headphones. The headphones I use are Sennheisser HD650, which
have a good frequency range and accuracy. I will also knock stereo signals down to
mono to make sure they don't fold up and disappear.
Once everything is phase-coherent, I will sum my kicks to a single track, my snares
to a single track, and group my toms to a stereo bus. I will take the overheads,
rooms, hat, ride, and Addictive overheads/room and group all of them to a stereo
bus. Grouping and summing allows me to have many submixes going on for quick
control over further processing, and volume riding and balancing in different sections.
I will set up a rough drum mix and balance so I can hear what I have and what I
might still need. More often than not I will now mult the kick, snare, and toms for aggressive EQing and compressing, or use Slate's Trigger 2.0 to find close-miked samples to
beef up or balance out what my close mics are already giving me. A good idea is to
check out a frequency analyzer to see what energy you have or are lacking at this
point. Remember that punch is usually found in the low 300 Hz-and-below region.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2016