triggering drum samples for ambience

[thomaswomas]

i've started to use drum samples in my mixes to thicken up snares or kick drums, and have had some success doing so.

but i've recently read that the great andy wallace uses drum samples 'to drive ambiance' more than to replace sounds.

can anyone tell me how this would work in a digital mixing environment?

i'm assuming it's something to do with triggering samples along side the real drums, and feeding the samples to a reverb unit or something, then using the reverb in the mix rather than the samples.

or i may be completely wrong

any thoughts?

thanks

 

[mixsit]

Not a bad idea at all. Sometimes you want a verb to 'speak differently than what you get'. Options- eq the verb return, eq the send, or 'send something else. (what else? Anything?
I had a track (well several songs) were I recorded a blues harp amp (fairly close) + a mic for acoustic tone on the player- Most of them use a bit of the 'acoustic slipped in, one I got to use it as a send only.

 

[Ronan]

The idea behind this is to use a drum trigger along side the real snare and send the sample snare out to the reverb only (and not to the stereo mix directly) A really easy way to do this in a DAW environment is to duplicate your snare track and use drumagog (or what ever) on the duplicate track and then put a reverb after drumagog on that chanel set to 100% wet. Blend to taste.

 

[Farview]

Every so often I get mixes where the drums are all mixed together on a stereo track. in order to put some verb on the snare, I duplicate the track and insert Drumagog set up to only trigger on the snare. I pick a sample that makes the verb do what I want when I send it to the reverb.

I've done the 'send the sample to the reverb' trick. It works great when the real sound doesn't excite the reverb the way you want it to. It's also good at getting you a more consistant reverb tail, even if the snare itself isn't very consistant.

 

[LeeRosario]

i've started to use drum samples in my mixes to thicken up snares or kick drums, and have had some success doing so.

but i've recently read that the great andy wallace uses drum samples 'to drive ambiance' more than to replace sounds.

can anyone tell me how this would work in a digital mixing environment?

i'm assuming it's something to do with triggering samples along side the real drums, and feeding the samples to a reverb unit or something, then using the reverb in the mix rather than the samples.

or i may be completely wrong

any thoughts?

thanks

you pretty much answered your own question here. I didn't know that Andy Wallace did this for a fact, but I figured as much. It's almost blatantly apparent in his work, but in real good taste.

I see where the original dry signal would be more of an attack thing and the sample handles the tail.

I think it works best in commercially viable music and music that depends on a very machine backbeat. So in other words, I wouldn't think it sounds good in grassroots live sounding music. Like jazz.

Mudvayne's LD 50 is always an example I come back to on this. I mean the concept is easy enough to understand. You can send that to some type of ambient plate verb (normally works good on drums).

How you process that is completely up to you.

 

[Farview]

It's also good for keeping bleed out of the reverb.