DESCRIPTION:
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A video discussion and audio comparison (at 4:13) of using live drums vs sampled drums in a mix.

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Transcription Excerpt:

Hey, what's up guys? David Glenn for theproaudiofiles.com and davidglennrecording.com.

Today I want to talk about drum replacement. Live drums versus triggering samples, or even the argument against enhancing or blending samples to better the live recording.

Now, this is a question I get all of the time in my membership site. It's called The Mix Academy. You can go check that out at themixacademy.com, but members are always asking me, “hey, why do you just rush to and go to replacing drums?”It's really not as simple as just one answer, so I'm going to elaborate and give several reasons why I like to replace drums. So number one, drums just don't come to me sounding very good. I don't know about you, but the stuff that I'm mixing requires a lot of surgery and a lot of work to try to get them to sound good.

So that's kind of the first reason. Back in the day, you've got producers and engineers in the room with the drummer moving the kit around, swapping kicks, snares, toms, between the songs, what fits the song the best, etcetera. That just doesn't happen that much anymore.

The equipment, we're not dealing with the best of microphones and preamps in many situations, and so the actual engineering of drums pretty much sucks nowadays, in general. From my experience. Let me not speak for everybody.

So that's number one. Number two, I do this as a business. This is my way to provide for my family, and if I can go from A-Z faster, that's going to help make me money. So whenever I go and I pull open a kick drum from the good people at That Sound, my favorite drum sample company, and I pull open a snare, that's going to get me from A to Z a million times faster than messing around with the individual kick and snare and all of that good stuff.

Don't get me wrong, I still do auto-align and phase enhancement, and I want to get the drums to sound the best they can the way they were given to me, and I'm always listening first and evaluating the tones, but again, if I can go from A to Z fast, that's going to help get the results that I'm looking for quicker, which is going to get the project done faster, which is going to get the payment coming in.

So, I'm all for the soul and the emotion of music, and the arts. That's all extremely important, but we also have to feed our families, right?So another reason. Isolation. Back when I was young and dumb, I was at Azimuth Recording Studios in Indianapolis, Indiana – give a shout out to my man, Ryan Atkins, Travis Moore, those guys up there. Incredible people. Go check them out if they're in the area.

Ryan – it was my first real experience in a studio, and he had some incredible microphones, but even more important, he had some great techniques for recording drums. From throwing plywood down on the floor, to isolating the kick with a trash can and then a blanket, etc.

I could go on for days. Actually, one time, this is kind of a cool story, I took a mic, threw it over the drummers head, routed that into the booth where we had my pedal board – my guitar rig with all kinds of stuff, and then we sent that to an amp and mic'd up the amp with like, two or three mics. We used to stick mics up in the AC unit. We'd have the grille off and stick them up there.

Just all kinds of crazy stuff. A little rabbit trail, but Ryan is the man is what I'm trying to say, and he would isolate the kick, and he would treat that, and then he would EQ the kick in, the kick out... We'd get kind of the kick sub tunnel thing going on, and that was awesome.

The best part of that technique was the isolation that it gives us to get in and boost click in the kick and not get a ton of overhead, or hat/ride, etc. The metal coming through and just creating a trashy sound.

That's a lost art. Not many guys out there are killing it with their drum recordings, and for the most part, I'm dealing with bands who are recording themselves nowadays.

So kind of a messy subject, but for you naysayers out there, there's more than just throwing on samples. There's a lot of thought that goes into that. If I'm sent, again, a producer, engineer, or band who works their butt off and they swap out kick sounds, and they're tuning the drums – that's another argument, tuning. Sometimes, it could be really, really well recorded, but the tuning is just terrible, so it's easier to go to a sample.

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