Recording - June 2015 - 28

As a mix engineer and drummer, I get
a lot of sessions with poorly recorded
drums. Most are recorded in home studios, and may suffer from poor drumming
performance, inferior equipment and/or
recording techniques, or simply a lot of
spill or bleed from other drums.
Sometimes the best approach to saving
such a recording is to replace the drum
sounds with better ones; I have been
using drum replacement software for
quite some time, with great success.
Many manufacturers make drum
replacement software, but the two bestknown and most used are WaveMachine
Labs Drumagog and Trigger from Steven
Slate Drums. I use both, for different purposes, and here are some reasons why.
But first, a little history
Drum replacement techniques have
been around since the 1970s. The first
drum replacement machine was invented
by engineer Roger Nichols. It was a 125
kHz/12-bit drum machine called Wendel,

1. Is there significant bleed in the individual tracks, making processing almost
impossible? If the answer is yes, then
replacement is most likely the best option.
2. Are the sounds of individual drums so
bad that processing is next to impossible?
If the answer is yes, then replacement is
most likely the best option.
3. "The drums sound pretty good, and I
want them to sound great, but I'm not very
good at processing drum tracks."
Enhancement is most likely the best option.
4. "The drums sound good, but I have a
significant hi-hat bleed into the snare
drum mic." This can be fixed with
replacement or enhancement.
Installation
System requirements for Mac and PC
are pretty straightforward. Instructions
and help are easily available on each
software company's website (links
below). Disk space is very small for the
programs themselves; it's the accompanying libraries of drum sound files that need

Drumagog is also available in Basic and
Pro versions, and Trigger has an EX version, that are more affordable but lack
some features; you can decide what you
need before shelling out your money.
Trigger 2 Platinum
When you first insert an instance of
Trigger 2 in the plug-in section of a channel, it opens to the Triggering page,
which is the heart of this plug-in. The interface is laid out in a mixer format with
faders, pan, tune, polarity invert, solo,
and mute. It has an input section and output section, a waveform window and a
trigger adjustment section. This interface
lets you place up to eight stereo samples
and mix as desired; since most users
understand how mixers work, it's pretty
easy to navigate Trigger from the get-go.
The left side of the interface starts with
buttons to navigate between pages:
Browser (finding available samples),
Triggering (discussed above), and
Settings (general controls and latency

By Pat Bautz

which was used on Steely Dan's famous
Gaucho recording.
In the 80s, many techniques were used
to enhance or replace drums. Engineers
and producers would use a keyboard to
trigger drum samples. The samples were
used to mix with or replace drum tracks.
Sometimes, because the musician was
playing by hand, this would require multiple takes to match the existing drum
track.
Another technique to enhance drum
sounds was to place transducers on drumheads to trigger sampled sounds.
Engineers would mix the acoustic recorded drums with samples, or just use the
samples, to achieve whatever sound they
were looking for. Drum replacement software has advanced by leaps and bounds
from this original concept.
When to replace and when to
enhance?
There's no definitive answer to this
question. Here are a few questions to
think about to arrive at an answer.
28

RECORDING June 2015

a lot of storage-starting at 3 GB and
going way up to tens of Gigs, depending
on how many extra drum sample packs
you purchase beyond the free sounds
included with the programs. Both plug-ins
are available as 32- or 64-bit AU, VST,
and AAX; Trigger 2 is also available in
32-bit RTAS for older Pro Tools systems.
Both Trigger 2 and Drumagog 5 are
available as downloadable products. I
didn't have any issue installing
Drumagog 5 or Trigger 2 on my Mac Pro
running Mac OS X 10.6.8. My studio PC
still runs Windows XP; I could install
Drumagog 5, but Trigger 2 will only
install on a PC running Windows 7 and
above. When downloading sample files
for either Drumagog 5 or Trigger 2, make
sure you save all the samples in a master
folder and note its location. You will need
to point the programs to their respective
folders when you first open them.
Now, let's talk about how these programs work. I own and use the latest topend editions of both programs: Drumagog
5 Platinum and Trigger 2 Platinum.

setup). Further down you'll find handy
buttons for View Mixer, View Curves (see
below), Flip All Phases, Save Preset, and
two MIDI Capture buttons.
To load a sample or preset, first tab to
the Browser page, where you'll see all of
your available samples in folders. The folders are laid out so all samples that correspond with each sound are grouped
together. To activate an individual sample,
simply drag and drop in the first rectangle
to the left. If you want to add more samples, drag and drop to the next available
rectangle. I usually load all of the samples
in a group so that I can pick and choose
the ones I want. The samples identified as
presets will load all corresponding sounds
by double-clicking on the preset. On the
left side of the browser window, you will
notice an Audition setting. When turned
on, it plays each sample when you click it.
The Triggering window's Input section
allows you to filter false triggers with a gate
that has attack, hold and release settings. It
also has an Input level control, a Suppress
setting (see below), and lowcut and highcut

Recording - June 2015

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