Changing drum tones

[Timbecile]

Hi everyone! I'm new here.

So here's the problem I'm having with a song I'm currently working on...

I found this track on an old ADAT tape, and pulled it off and into my laptop (running SF Vegas). I'm working on retracking all the guitars and vocals right now. Problem is, while I'm happy with the drum performance, the drum tones suck. So, I'm looking for ideas on ways to replace (or add to) the drum tones without having to re-do the performance.

Thanks!

 

[bucchild]

Are the drums all in a single track, or are they separated?

Are you looking to change the tones of the entire drum track as a whole, or looking to change the tones of everything separately?

Personally, I have now idea to do anything without everything being separated.

 

[Timbecile]

They're separated into only two tracks (I only had 8 tracks on the ADAT).

The separation is like this... 1 track for bass drum and highhat, 1 track for snare and the rest of the brass.

The drums were originally recorded with a TD-7 electronic drumset (which has some of the worst drum tones I've ever heard)

All I want to change really is the sound of the bass drum and the snare. The rest I think I can deal with.

 

[bucchild]

Okay....keep in mind that I am totally guessing here, but I have a couple ideas for you to try....it might not work for jack squat.

It might be a little more likely to have success with the bass/hi hat track than the other track, but you might be able to split the bass from the hats, and who knows, maybe even split all the other tracks into individual tracks.

I would try to copy the drum/hat track into 2 new copies (in case this doesn't work so you don't lose the original). Play one back and play with your EQ until the hats are mostly out of the picture (basically cutting your highs completely to nothing, and finding what mids you can get rid of before your tone is gone). Try the inverse so that the bass drum is mostly out of the picture. If you actually achieve something doing this, you can play with the EQ of your bass drum only track to possibly get a better tone out of it. If you like the way the hats sound already, you can probably leave that track be.

You could try the same concept with the "everything else" track....

The other idea is much easier, but I have no idea of how it will sound. Try re-recording the tracks you have, but with different EQ's and maybe you can improve your tone.

 

[Timbecile]

oooh, I think I might have found a solution.

After doing a search on this site for sidechain, I found a post with a link to http://www.drumagog.com/ sounds like that's exactly what I need. I'm gonna try it out tonight! Thanks fer all your help!

 

[bucchild]

Okay, so I guess replacing them outright would probably be a possible solution, too...lol

 

[Timbecile]

Alright, here's the update after trying Drumagog...

not a perfect soluting straight out of the box, but with a little tweaking it came out pretty good. here's what I did on the snare track (which also had toms and a hihat)

Put a noise gate on there. since the HH was so much quieter than anything else it was a quick and easy solution to getting rid of it. lost the decay on the snare, but since it was going to be replaced anyway, that didn't matter.

Used a lowpass filter and some extra eq, to get rid of the toms. And apllied the drumagog to what was left...so far so good.

Now I gotta do the toms and the BD.

Man though is drumagog a resource hog.