The EM Poll

Reality Check

Sep 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Mitchell Sigman

           

In small-project studios, recording drums live is the exception rather than the rule and is a luxury reserved for those people who have proper mics and rooms and a talented stick basher. Now you, too, can produce excellent-sounding (albeit artificial) drum tracks. In this article, I'll explain how to create the illusion of a live, grooving drummer using sampled drums and a digital audio sequencer.

FIG. 1: The red box indicates where to select the appropriate Battery output pairs for each aux object in the Logic’s environment window.

Anyone who has heard the raw tracks of a multimiked live drum kit knows that unprocessed drums sound very different from the polished, vibrant-sounding kits on commercial CDs. Extensive compression, EQ, and spatialization effects make all the difference, and that's what you want to replicate in the artificial-drum world. Here, I've used Apple Logic Pro 7 along with the Native Instruments Battery 2 drum sampler, but these ideas can easily be applied to any sequencer and sampler.

Be Discrete

Though drum loops are currently in fashion for creating drum tracks, a sampler with individual instrument hits gives you much more flexibility because you control every note. Furthermore, by assigning each instrument to its own audio output, you can compress, EQ, and reverb each drum individually.

Begin by inserting Battery in an Instrument track in Logic and opening up a stock Battery kit. (When you instantiate Battery in Logic, be sure to use the multichannel option.) In the Logic Environment window, create a stereo aux object for each Battery stereo output you intend to use, then select the Battery outputs in the aux objects' I/O boxes (see Fig. 1). You can now go back to Battery and select the desired output pair for each cell (see Fig. 2). You can assign outputs for multiple cells simultaneously by Shift-clicking on multiple cells, and then selecting an output pair.

FIG. 2: The red box indicates where to set individual output channels for each cell in Battery.

A Warm Compress

The next step is to apply separate processing to the individual outputs by inserting effects in the aux channels. Start by compressing the kick drum. Settings vary depending on the particular kick drum sample and song, but generally kicks should have a thick, solid low end and a present beater. For that, set the compression ratio to 3:1 with a gain setting of about -8 dB. Use an attack of at least 20 ms so the smack of the beater doesn't get squashed. Decay should be fairly quick for hard kicks and longer for softer kicks.

Follow the compressor with a parametric EQ. For kick drums, use a low-shelf EQ at around 100 Hz to boost or cut the lows; a spectrum analyzer can be really helpful for choosing the frequency. Think fat, but don't overwhelm the track. If it's a little honky, a gentle dip in the 400 to 600 Hz range will smooth it out. Finally, a gentle boost at 1 kHz will bring out the attack of the beater.

Ensnared

For the snare drum, again insert a compressor followed by a parametric EQ. Because snare tones vary greatly, you'll need to experiment. For a realistic snare sound, subtle compression and EQ work best — perhaps a 2:1 or 3:1 compression ratio with a -6 dB gain setting and an attack of about 30 ms. Use EQ to mildly exaggerate what's already there. You can adjust the ping of the snares with an EQ band in the 500 to 600 Hz range, and you can use a high-shelf EQ near 5 kHz to brighten things up. To achieve a more artificial snare sound like the Cars or Queen, use a higher compression ratio, more gain reduction, and a superquick attack (try 0 ms). That will crush the attack and take out all the ping.

Regardless of the tone you choose, send the channel to a bus to add reverb. You can use a reverb on the drum's own channel, but using a bus makes adjustment easier, and you can send multiple drums to the same reverb. That puts them in the same sonic space and saves processor power. Be sure to listen to the drums in the context of the mix for a reality check.