Enhancing Your Drum Tracks

Okay, so following all those rules and bits of advice I've given you, our drum track should now be in time and it should groove.

Importance of Quality Drum Sounds

One more thing that's quite important:

• If you use live drums or a combination, ensure that the drum sounds are actually good.
• You might not have mic'd up the drum kit yourself, which means the person who did could have made some mistakes.
• Consequently, your bass drum might sound horrible, or your snare might have no impact.

Using Samples to Improve Your Mix

There's nothing stopping you from adding your own samples. Especially with a pop record:

• Every time the bass drum hits, you want it to be at the same level.
• You should be able to rely on it to carry your groove right through the song.

This is something mix engineers have done ever since the 80s:

• Triggering in their own kick drums, snare drums, toms, etc.

Building Your Drum Library

Consider gathering a nice selection of kicks and snares:

• Incorporate them into your mixes or add them in when you feel it's necessary.

Software Options for Drum Replacement

I'm just going to quickly mention different bits of software:

• Pro Tools has a feature called Sound Replacer.
• Slate Digital offers a product called Trigger.
• In Logic and Pro Tools, there's also some drum-to-MIDI software that can convert your kick and snare drum signals into MIDI notes to play off a sampler (like Kontakt or EXS).

My Practice with Sound Replacer

I do this quite often, so don't be scared to add your own drum sounds. It will really help keep your mix consistent.

Step-by-Step with Pro Tools Sound Replacer

Let's discuss how to use the Sound Replacer in Pro Tools:

1. Duplicate the Kick Drum Track:

   • I'm going to do it on a little section here.

2. Select the Audio:

   • Highlight the audio section you want to use.

3. Load the Plugin:

   • In the audio suite, locate the Sound Replacer and load in a kick drum (here's one I prepared earlier).

4. Trigger Points:

   • The Sound Replacer will recognize the trigger points.
   • I usually turn off the dynamics and check the way it triggers.

5. Zoom In:

   • Zoom in a little to ensure we can see the whole thing.

6. Render the New Kick Drum:

   • You can see all the drum hits; as you bring this down, you catch all the kick drums, then hit Render.

Evaluating Your New Kick Drum

Now, let's take the plugins off quickly and see how that works:

• Blend that in and check for any doubles; it's worth going through and checking.
• On the whole, if you look at the waveform, you can see each kick drum triggers where the original is.

Final Thoughts

Let's have a listen to compare.

• Yes, we can hear the new kick drum adds quite a bit of attack, making it more solid.
• There are no variations in level on that kick drum, which is ideal to underpin the whole mix.

You can use a similar approach for the snare drum; it works the same way.

So, get yourself a good library of kick drums and snare drums, and don't be afraid to use them!