Recording - January 2016 - 20

though the original toms have been
muted. Panning them across the stereo
field will also be easier, since you're not
dragging the bleed from any other elements along with them.
If you don't have a replacement plugin, you can still use samples to replace
the toms. Again, select sounds that are
close to what you'd prefer. Now, create
a new empty track under each of the
tom tracks. Place the new sample into
the empty track near the location of the
hit and zoom way in on the old and
new tracks at that point in the timeline,
so that you can drag and nudge the
new sample into perfect alignment with
the 'old' tom hits. Use your DAW to shift
the sample's pitch up or down to the
desired note and fine tune it from there.
Most tom occurrences will be sporadically peppered throughout a song's performance, making this an easier fix than
it seems, since the newly-edited tom hits
can be then cut and pasted wherever
they occur. If your tom parts are more
rhythmically complex, involving repeated

strikes on the same drum, you may want
two or three variations of each tom sample to keep things sounding natural.
Smart fixes for dumb mistakes
I am a big believer in capturing those
early takes or even intial run-throughs,
where the band isn't even aware that
we're recording yet. So many great performances come from just those
moments. It behooves you to be in
Record Mode as soon as possible,
because you never know when the lightning of inspiration will strike; if and when
it does, you'll want to be the one holding
it in a bottle at the end of the take.
Along with that potential for glory often
comes a flurry of items that scream for
our attention: Questions from the band,
more monitor for the bass player, that
weird hum... leading us to scramble
around like an octopus at a switchboard.
For example, I recently found a misrouting issue within a drum performance
that had the room mic's signal mistakenly
recorded to the kick drum track. Looking

closely through all of the kit's recorded
tracks, I found that the floor tom's bleed
gave the clearest picture of the actual
bass drum hits, but these could not be
cleaned up, isolated or raised enough in
volume to use for a triggering method. I
made a duplicate of the floor tom track,
zoomed way in on each and every one
of those kick hits and manually sliced the
track at their attacks. I made another
slice, about an eighth note later in time. I
then selected and deleted the rest of the
leftover pieces. Then I took all of the
"kick hit" clips and raised their level
about 18 dB. This gave me enough level
to trigger a kick in Drumagog, but still
retained the dynamic range for the most
believable result. It was a lot of tedious
work, but well worth the effort.
I once had a problem with a hi-hat
that was bleeding all over the snare
track and smearing the whole aural picture. EQing it out killed the snare track's
sound and compression only made
things worse. The solution was to run the
snare track through a de-esser, 'tuned' to

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