'Roughing up' sampled drums?

noisedude

noisedude

New member
So I've been handed a project where instead of using FL or Drumagog, someone has literally copied and pasted in all the samples into the various tracks of the song. So it's like programmed/looped drums, except they've been done manually rather than via a plugin/external software.

How can I start to humanise these tracks a bit? The samples are good and the rhythms done well but it's just a little (and I only mean a little) too uniform at the moment. The drummer in this band is pretty metronomic anyway but I just need some ideas on how I can do something to make them sound a little more 'real'.

Cheers guys! :)

Nik
 
Off the top of my head..

You could try to, (if possible with whatever equipment your using) play with quantization. use a "groove" or "swing" quantize function.
Might shuffle the pattern a tiny bit and give it a more 'human' feel.
Thats really just a shot in the dark. Might sound horrible, might help.

meh, im really tired, thats all I got.
 
It sounds like it's all audio, no MIDI? If that's the case, you won't be able to use a groove qntz function, which was an excellent suggestion otherwise. If there is no MIDI, then the next question is whether the drums are spread across a few tracks. If you have a seperate snare tracks, this is the first target for humanizing. Try pushing some of the snare hit's just ahead of the beat, and alter the level on some to accent key beats. Next would be the toms. I'd suggest leaving the Hi-hats and rides tight, same with the kick, just vary their dynamics here and there.

Good luck, RD
 
Damn drummers !!!

Get the guy to come in and record. Stand next to him with a metronome, and everytime he is dead on, slap him in the head. Then pull one of his headphones off his ear and tell him, "Now try that again, but with more feeeeeling."

Eventually he will get the hang of it... :cool:
 
Robert D said:
It sounds like it's all audio, no MIDI? If that's the case, you won't be able to use a groove qntz function, which was an excellent suggestion otherwise. If there is no MIDI, then the next question is whether the drums are spread across a few tracks. If you have a seperate snare tracks, this is the first target for humanizing. Try pushing some of the snare hit's just ahead of the beat, and alter the level on some to accent key beats. Next would be the toms. I'd suggest leaving the Hi-hats and rides tight, same with the kick, just vary their dynamics here and there.

Good luck, RD
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Cheers man. Yeah it's all separate tracks. Quite funny actually ... I can see how this would be a quite quick way of doing it if you don't have some sort of looping plugin or a soft sampler. I've actually put the SSL Listen Mic Compressor (awesome free download here - http://www.solid-state-logic.com/resources/lmc1plugin.html) onto the snare and it sounds pretty cool now. I will waggle the kicks around a bit and possibly re-do the open hats and crashes manually here myself. The end result will probably be quite a bit better than it would have been at my place to be honest!
 
sushi-mon said:
Get the guy to come in and record. Stand next to him with a metronome, and everytime he is dead on, slap him in the head. Then pull one of his headphones off his ear and tell him, "Now try that again, but with more feeeeeling."

Eventually he will get the hang of it... :cool:
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You know what? Of all things ...... it's a girl drummer. :eek:
 
I dont know about real, but maybe an idea:


If your able, pass your stereo drum mix through a VCR deck (recording on a good blank casette) and then run it back into the computer. Or not even the entire drumset, maybe just your snare and kick. I haven't tried it yet, but I had a dream about it last night.

Must be worth a try.
 
That is a curious notion. I wonder if the audio tracks on VHS are any better then regular audio cassette quality.....doubtful perhaps, but it could be a neat effect.
 
Reggie said:
That is a curious notion. I wonder if the audio tracks on VHS are any better then regular audio cassette quality.....doubtful perhaps, but it could be a neat effect.
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Well it goes off the dat machine principles. Except with the "cheap at home" vibe about it.

So technically, it's just a really ghetto DAT machine. The storage is analog, so it would be fun to see how the drums end up sounding as post "VCR analog".


Compared to casette, I would be very hopeful that it sounds better.
 
I seem to recall that the HiFi track on VHS is actually very high quality audio track. So it does sound a good deal better than Audio cassette. The regular audio tracks are more like traditional cassette, however.

When I was younger, we used to take our HiFi VHS deck to the studio, and make a master mixdown on it, so that we could take it home and make cassettes! Of course, this was back before burning CDs was an affordable option.

I'd say the quality is somewhat better than cassette, but probably short of 1/4 tape running at 15ips.

It depends on the VCR, of course, as well...
 
I personally wouldn't put any time in on running the drums through VCR.

What you can do to give some life to the drums is run them through a compressor really hard. Meaning they are going into distortion or close to it. Then mix that back with the original drum tracks. There are a lot of variations on this, but the basic idea is to slam the heck out of the drum track and then mix back as much as you want with the originals.

I do this with Distressor's which are great for that. But a cheap compressor that also does it well is the MXR 136 dual limiter.

The other thing you can do is put a delay on the drums and mix that in a little bit. That will help give the tracks some life as well.
 
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I exclusively work with sampled drums. If I need them to sound less robotic, at times what I do is take a sampled breakbeat, chop it up in ReCycle, export the MIDI. Then I import the MIDI part in Cubase, extract the groove from it, and then use that to quantize the programmed drums to it. From there on, I also find that playing around with velocity helps to liven things up even more.

In your case, you'll probably want to slice the drum parts using something like Cubase's HitPoints (or PT Beat Detective... I assume it works in a similar manner), then use another drum solo/part whatever to exctract the groove from and quantize your drums to it.
 
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