quick opinion

[appleyardrules]

so this song im mixing for my band
the kick is really horrible
im willing to take the time
since i dont have a sampler
i do have a kick sample and i was thinking to make a zillion copies and position it right with the other hits, ive done liek half a song so far in half an hour and it sounds dead on
is this alright, or is there an easier way

ps. i have no money to invest in such things as drumagog

[NL5]

There are some free pelacer plugs, but I don't know what they are called.

Other than that, what you are doing is a pretty easy way to do it. I would have used more than one sample though.

[appleyardrules]

yeah i think i am
and im going to look at the general volume and increase it in certain parts where it was in the original track to give it a little more dynamics

[ndycus1]

what program are you using?

[appleyardrules]

cubase sx3

[johnbob]

i was working on a cd that was all hand drums and such, and on the final song of the project, the guy wanted to do this huge african beat with bag pipes playing in the background. the song sounded awesome, but it lacked body. so we took these four djembes and did exactly what you're doing. there was no eq or anything involved at all. but the song ended up sounding huge, like you were standing in the middle of this war dance. but like the other guy said, vary the sample that you use.

[travelin travis]

i've tried ALL of the free replacer plugins. they all pretty much suck. no, i take that back.........not pretty much.....they all DO suck. i was after the same thing not too long ago. i actually had a look around yesterday just to see if things have changed but no luck. i even tried out a couple (even though I don't need them now) after reading this post. you would be better off doing it by hand.

another option would be loading your sample/samples into a sampler plugin and using one of those onscreen keyboard plugins to trigger the sample as the drum track is playing. as long as you're running fairly low latency, that'll get you in the ball park and then you can go back and use the piano roll or drum editor to tighten things up. if your drums are recorded to a click track, you could even set up auto quantize to push/pull your triggered kicks to the grid so that you don't have to go back and edit their placement. i think it's called magnetize in cubase. you'd still have to edit some velocities though.

using a few different samples of the same hit would probably help create a more realistic sound. load each sample into a different slot or instance of the sampler plugin and assign each to a different midi note. just some ideas.

as far as the audio > midi plugins, especially the ones only intended to detect amplitude, i don't understand what the hell is so complicated about it. the volume of a note or hit gets converted to a voltage or number and that gets converted to a midi velocity level. how complicated can that be?