You probably have already seen my Superior Drummer 3 video that I posted last year
Superior 3 is the new software drummer from Toontrack
and if you've seen any of my latest amp demos and videos
You have probably already heard me using it for music
With that previous video I did
I was merely just scratching the surface of what you can do with the app
And today I'm going to show you something that has been very useful for me
and that is the Tracker
A tool to replace already recorded drums with samples
I've been using this a fair amount these past weeks for my old Feared albums
You know, just to spice up the sound a little bit, giving older albums new life.
Essentially, what you do is that you analyze already recorded drum tracks
and replace them or mix them with samples of 'Suberieer'-- of Superior Drummer 3
and it's all done within the plugin itself
So, I'm gonna show you in this video you're watching right now
So, I need to put my headphones on
Alright so here we are in Logic Pro X
I've loaded up tracks from the song Erased, from the Feared album Vinter, as an example
And as you can see everything is separated here and yeah, the drums kind of sound like shit
because they're not mixed, it makes sense.
These are the raw tracks of that session before it was mixed.
So, these are the drums
Kevin Talley playing the drums by the way, and then we have the rest on here
Okay
So what I've done now is basically just set a volume and I have a limiter on the output
Just to ... you know, spare you from having your ears exploding
Now, I want to open up Superior Drummer 3, okay? So, I create a new channel
There it is
So here I have the plugin window, I go into the tracker part of the plugin
and, as you can see, It's all empty
Now, what you need to do is that you need to load in all those drum files into this tracker
and if you don't have any drum files, because maybe you are not in a band or whatever, that's fine
You can pretend to be in my band and go buy some raw tracks from the Feared albums from fearedband.com
Because we all just need to spend even more money on things
Yes, and support the artist who lets you dissect your music
I'm the artist by the way
Okay, so what you can do, you can basically drag your audio files into this tracker window
or you can just add them like this
So let's go into my hard drive and look at all my secret files
'Raw tracks'
Now, if I would replace drums in a production, I would normally just replace all the drum heads, you know ?
meaning no cymbals, you know? No hi-hats
because cymbals and overhead microphones are catching so much of everything
I mean, sometimes you only have, you know, two overhead microphones and five different cymbals maybe
but I think in general, you know, keeping cymbals will just make the whole kit sound more natural
So, let's just add kicks, snare top, tom, tom, tom.
Okay, open
There you go.
But worth mentioning is that, with Superior Drummer
you can still change out and replace individual hi hats and cymbals and stuff like that as well within the app
But since I have two overhead channels for this, I'm just going to go and use those original cymbals, okay?
And now Superior 3 is going to analyze these tracks and recognize which track is what part of the drumkit
and then 'deter-mine' the hits and how strong the hit
and after that makes some kind of MIDI map of the original drum tracks, right?
Just like that, and now it's done.
So, let's listen
That sounds lovely. So, okay, let's just load in a better drumkit than the default jazz kit.
Come on, I'm a metal dude, just have the most metal sounding preset loaded already.
But Ola, you could have just have loaded it up yourself if you just prepared for the video
Shut the f*** up.
Here it is. Okay, let's go for 'Texas Metal'
Okay
Alright, so now we have the kicks, the snare and the toms loaded up into the tracker
and all of this shown here, it might be a little intimidating. So, let me explain.
Sorry
So, here you have the loaded audio tracks
and here are the waveforms and hits that Superior Drummer analyzed
If we zoom in, we can see ...
We can see how every one of these white lines are registered hits
that will generate or trigger a hit in Superior Drummer 3
And depending on how tall the white line it is, the harder the hit, okay? Pretty straightforward, right?
Down here we have the individual velocities or how hard a hit is
and here you can see the hits and hits that might be something else triggering the MIDI
For instance, this little hit right here
You know, it's just a small little douchebag that is totally worthless in life
but it can also just be some, you know, some bleed from the microphone or whatever, that mistriggered
and if this hit is below this threshold line, it won't get recognized as a hit.
So again, up here you have the threshold of the audio track, which determines which hits will trigger
and down here is the velocity threshold of the resulting hits that are above the threshold line here
So these hits that are here, if you see I drag this like this, the hits disappear from the row below
So if I want to change the velocity of this particular hit, I can just do it right here, see?
Also, if you want you can also add more hits here
So, you can add like ...
If you want
So, now when all the tracks are loaded up
The default value Is that there's a 50% mix of the original drum and the trigger drum.
So, let's listen to the snare
Turning this little knob right here
you can go from having a complete original drum or, you know, the source sound to a fully sampled drum.
And in this case, for snare and toms, I like to have, you know, a little bit of the original source sound left
because it just makes it sound a little bit more natural in that sense, so let's keep it around here. So ...
So we're on here, okay.
Okay, so let's go and watch these ... zoom out a little bit, see if I can adjust the thresholds a little ...
Okay, so as you can see on this part for instance, these are probably just bleeds from something else
You can see these little small ones that are, you know, very low velocity
But you can remove those either by, you know, doing it like this
Changing the the total threshold
or you can just go and click them like this, you can select them like that, and just 'De-Trigger'
Easy as that, okay?
And same thing up here, you see we have a couple of smaller notes that are not supposed to be in there
We can just remove it like that, okay? Just to clean it up a little bit
but even though, I mean, since the velocities of these small little assholes are so low
they're not going to be heard when it triggers
Yeah
Okay, so now that I have somewhat of a complete track, let's add in the real overheads from the original drums.
So, here we have the original drums by themselves
This is without Superior Drummer 3
Awesome
It's not too bad actually
So, now we only have the overheads activated, okay? And let's add in Superior Drummer 3.
Oh, there was a little mistrigger, then we go fix that. See? Just like that.
Now, the absolute coolest part, when all of this is done
is that you can just try out different types of drum sounds by changing the presets in Superior Drummer 3
You know, I can change the settings like, you know, velocity curves or, you know, for every part of the drum
and basically just work these drums like if it was a MIDI track
So okay, I want Andy Sneap to mix my drums today, so let's take the Andy Sneap kit 2
Cool, huh?
Okay. Hey, pop maybe. 'Big Swish', that sounds like a kit for me.
That's good.
I mean, the presets in Superior drummer 3 that come when you buy it are excellent, I must say
They all sound pretty awesome out of the box
Okay, let's go for 'Djent', because ... you know, djent.
4 gigabytes of data and a djent preset, it's not bad
Yeah, maybe I can do this, then I can do like this
Then I can take all these drums, put them on a drum buss ...
'Drums' and just put a little bit of compressor on there
Just one of my favorite ones, the Fabfilter
And even without having done anything with the overheads or cymbals
I think that Superior Drummer 3 and the real overheads blend pretty well together, without any mixing
And also from this, you can export MIDI and basically do whatever the f*** you needed to be done, you know?
Yeah, I mean, I think it sounds real
and, you know, would definitely be something I would use on a finished album
I mean you get the best of both worlds, really
The performance of a real drummer and the ability to have complete control of the drums
Even at a mixing stage, you don't have to settle for a sound in the production state of things
and that's what's so awesome about this and Superior Drummer 3
So, there you have it. That's one of the ways that I use Superior Drummer with my already recorded productions.
I think it's awesome
So yeah, that's my short little tip for you.
If you want to know more about Toontrack and Superior Drummer 3, check out ...
toontrack.com
Thank you so much for watching and, if you haven't already, please subscribe my channel
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