trigger advice needed!

[Madness]

Me & my band are entering the studio tomorrow, and we were to use an Alesis D4 to trigger the drums. The Alesis we would use belongs to someone we know, but the guy we know has some personal trouble at the moment and well, to get to the point, we won't be able to use the Alesis.

However, the studio is equipped with protools (24 mix), and also has (a demo version of) a plugin called 'sound replacer'. I have never worked with this, and neither has the engineer we'll be working with, so if anyone could shed some light on this plugin......I'd be really greatfull! From what I get you can use it to trigger the drums (afterwards). The demo version you can only use for 8 or so days, which wil (hopefully) do.
But,

1. Does this (demo!) plugin have samples of its own, or do I need to import them. If so, how do I do this. I know there are samples on the DDrum site. But in which format do I put them on CD and import them into protools?

2. The samples need to be in tune with the acoustic drum sound right? (I won't be using just the triggered sound). How do I make sure this happens, if I select a sample in advance, and we tune the drums to that sample, it could also sound like shit in the mix right? While if we select a sample during the mixing, it could well be that that one sounds great but is out of tune with the acoustic sound.

I'd really like to hear from people ho have got any experience with drumm triggers & recording and/or the protools soundreplacer-plugin

Thanx!

P.S. please don't start on me with 'you shouldn't use triggers etc.', 'cause at the speed our drummer plays it is a great tool to get his high speed blasts and fills on tape with alot of clarity.

 

[Executivos]

I've used sound replacer a lot and it's AWESOME especially when it comes to kick. It's not always easy to get "that" kick sound. It works as a replacer or an "adder" meaning you can keep your original sound and it will then create another track with the new sound adding to it or just get rid of the real sound and go ALL fake.

I doesn't have samples...I'm not sure it even works with midi (I need to find out because it would help me a lot) The cool thing is it has three diff thresholds so if you have good samples that are the same sample at diff velocities, then you can set one threshold for a light kick (or hit or event or whatver) a diff sample for a higher velocity and then yet another one for a really hard hit or kick. You need to have your own samples, and I beleive it's just wav format. I've read a lot about major producers using it to trigger like 3-5 different samples at the same time...so for ex: kick, you hear the miked kick, and then 3-5 other kicks all at once, eq'd diff and all.

Where you have to watch out is on other drums...snares will work if you're careful...same with toms...If there's a lot of light snare action between beats 2 and 4, then it will be kinda unrealistic....What I do is just set the threshold to not pickup the light tapping on the snare in between so that the 2's &4's really cut through.

Won't work on cymbals!! Don't even try....esecially hi hats. Just mic those and make sure you get a good sound!

But yeah to sum up it's a lifesaver. I hope this is not too late. If you have anymore questions, let me know.

 

[Executivos]

oh yeah samples....trust me....just about any free samples are not worth your time. There's obviously going to be some that are good, but most will sound like crap.

If you've got money to record at a tdm protools studio then, 25-50 dollars on a sample cd will make an AMAZING different. Some tell you exactly what drums they used, sizes, heads and such. You should be able to find one for your music style, as rave techno samples and top 40 pop samples are going to fit into death metal.