Lessons

Lesson Info

Sample Layering

Let's get into it with samples you know I play you guys unexamined ll of some samples and then example of no samples let's start with no samples and uh while you guys to pay attention to the differences just like we did with editing may I give you guys a little more volume in the room I think that'll be better all right that's no samples here samples all right one more time no samples and then samples and here's with samples that is office something that we're mixing right now but we listen those one more time sure not a problem uh here goes no samples pay attention to the snare here's with so you guys tell the difference between those what you noticing well you mentioned the snare which adds like a nice kind of fast attack kind of snap I felt like to the to the sound the other the biggest thing I noticed was the the toms sounded I guess foot full is well known that those were the big the big too that I noticed but if you notice it's not like it changed completely or anything it's not ...

like suddenly we had real drums and now we have fake drums it's just some elements sounded bigger so you want to tell me what you notice of anything different yeah pretty similar it just added a different tonal quality that added rather than subtracted right that's absolutely. I think everything's just punch here ah, the other thing is the dynamic of the snare with sample now everything is cutting through the mix the whole time on like they're not going to say that there aren't dynamics to the snare but now it's very much like smash it's like in your face every single snare it which also is important teo do when you're mixing, she'll talk about later because first of all, there's going to be a wall of guitars that's going to go on this two guitars perseid that is a lot of distortion plus distorted base plus layers have distorted vocals so that's scenarios really going to need to punch through that and this snare right here, theo, I mean, it sounds good and all the natural snare sounds good, but it's not it's, just not powerful enough straight up will get swallowed whole by the guitars. And then the other thing that you gotta keep in mind is when this goes to mastering that center channel is going to come down and the side channels going to come up. So the snare is going to get kind of buried. So you need to have a snare that's already really punchy and in front of the mix or it's just going to be gone basically finished were you about to say I was just noticing in the first one it's like you it seems like there was more of a sense of the room that the drums were in and they they all kind of blended together a little bit more. And then once the samples were added, you could still here the room but the individual drums were much more pronounced in much more defined. Now again, you've gotto keep mastering in ah in mind when sample layering cause this previous balance eyes more like what the balance will be after it gets smashed but mastering this right here you have tio basically mix with the future in mind and know that the snare will actually be more like it was in the original take uh just punch here so you are correct and online we have molotov who says that the simple version sounds like it had more room verb on it and then erik anders glass was wondering whether the kick in the no samples section was riel and morpheus to mill wonders whether the symbols were sampled as well. Okay, the kick is identical in both of them and it is a kick pad triggering a sample so that then change what I was referring to her snare samples and tom samples no, the symbols are identical and there is no more room verb on the snare or anything but what we did youse were samples with a long decay to them which is something that you guys should all use now also there are superior drummer room samples on there so while it's not room verb we added rooms to it by triggering room channels and superior via mitty that's lined up to the snares which I'm goingto demonstrate how to do so good ears I guess the audio feeds pretty good they can hear that stuff so let's uh move on tio video by john about sample replacement you guys will be able to see this entire video with the purchase of the course but here's another two minutes about this again this is the ninja level wizard level version of sample replacement I'm going to show you guys the concepts behind them how to think about it right so that you don't neuter your your drum tracks and john will show you a step by step on how to do it super fast so that further due process for getting midi from snare tracks is similar to kick tracks except we have a lot less notes to deal with and our accuracy needs to be better first let's create a new mini trach in name it snare now let's make our snare track pretty big and open massey di rt select the whole sameer track analyze it similar to kick the idea here is to get as many notes right with his few miss triggers and his few miss notes as possible but we're going to verify all the notes are there afterward done with dart what you want to do is aim the sensitivity slider towe where there's a valley in all these markers now I know this drummer does have some ghost notes in his playing, so I'm gonna try to capture is many of those as possible and simply delete all the miss triggers that I find but solo out the snare track and listen through a little bit and see how close we are you see that phil was pretty close there's one miss trigger at least looks like we have some miss triggers over here but that's okay, you could delete him in d rt by just clicking like this, but I think it's faster to do it after you've already taken the mickey out of darts, I'm gonna bump the sensitivity up just a little bit to see if we can get rid of some miss triggers later in the process. We're going to correct the velocities for these snare and tom heads, but when you're pulling the midi from the audio you want di rt or trigger to print the velocities is close to how you want them in the final version as you can especially fills all the single hard hits we're going to correct to a single velocity value, but we want the films to be dynamic, so why don't we zoom in on some pills and make sure that the velocity looks about right so you can see the rest of that video with the course I'm not going to cover a lot of the details on the step by step because as you can see it's included in the video and I will say this we use massive di rt and then we use superior drummer to trigger rooms and some of their samples and then we'll also add our own samples through other methods that will describe so let's talk about what super important here and it's velocities and same way that velocities are super important when recording will not recording when programming virtual drums they are super important when laying midi now the reason that we lame ity for our samples is really really simple you guys think of why there would be advantages to triggering off of midi versus audio but there are you for a loop midi is so much more ah uh I guess the word all uses defined there's no such like the transient is one hundred percent there it's not going to you know slightly ah very because of you know the weird things that happen in an actual recording well and the thing is that there's that you're absolutely right the midi is the midi and I already drive a mini track onto this and this doesn't change once I I line it doesn't change but sometimes some replacement engines will not bounced their audio out in perfect time so even in the media is right you're still dealing with something that has to interpret the midi and spit out the audio so it's really super careful with what you use or you're going to end up with tracks that air not aligned be phasing really weird and then not only will you have to align the midi but then you'll have to align the audio and that's a pain so it's important tio auto get that figured out I think that there is another super efficient reason to do this if you can figure out how to get your audio teo come out accurate which is what you want to change the sample like I mean say that I print a kick sample and I realized later that it's not working well if I was printing from audio I would have to print the audio and then realign the audio however with many there it is all I would have to do is hit record and voila we would be good for you about to say something that's what you were about to say now there's some there's some things that are super important that I started to talk about which are velocities and pitch matching let me show you what I mean going to load up on instance of superior drummer get that going and we're going to send this midi to superior it's an output get a uh I get a different drum set going for the sake of the bass drum because that's what we're replacing now he has remember on day one when we talked about pitch matching right between between drums between when we took the samples how we would listen to the previous samples then sean would hit the drum again and we would make sure that we were right in the same ballpark of not exactly on the right note well when laying samples that's super important too because you don't want things to be harmonizing weird like say you have the ring of one snare like the natural snares ringing to a certain note and then you layer in a snare that's ringing with a different note you'll end up with a minor second or something like that over your music so you messed up so you have to pitch match and you can do that right here like I showed you guys yesterday no we're not going to turn this into a virtual drum class but I will show you real quick the media that I laid for the kick is down here and let's see where the velocity is that now for kicks I want the velocities to be pretty similar and probably really high so I am just going to go ahead and call them one twenty seven so that you guys in the internet could be really happy about that make fun of me all right? And now we'll see what note this is on so switch it to notes should be on c one okay cool it is on c one so let's see what's going on here if it's uh it's working now mind you I'm showing you guys an extreme example just so you can definitely hear the sample I would never use a kick like this to replace shawn's kick it's artistically the wrong move so but you get the idea where and with what I showed you yesterday you can just bounce out of superior and you have a kick track you're good now you do need to align the midi however to the actual performance and where you put the mini notice super important because of what's going on in the overheads even if you're completely replacing the kick track it still needs to be locked to where you edited things or didn't edit things in this case so now that we know that we're getting sound through superior let's uh let's just check this out you see here's some examples I'm goingto scroll back and forth through them lots of people ask me where to put the midi note because it's really hard sometimes to see where the transient is so I just made you guys some slides with the help of john that would illustrate that so check these out see if these air making any sense now these air very zoomed in wave forms but we give you a little circle with a line through it showing exactly where the midi note should go meaning that's the beginning of the transient that's where you want to be you don't want to be right on the transient gonna be right where it is starting meaning not at the peak of it but where the notice changing you see on this first example basically that is the ending of the previous hit being cut off by the new hit that throws people off a lot so what you're looking for is that place where the wave suddenly spikes up that's how you know you've got a hit this one is a little bit harder to see but again you're looking for a massive change in the direction of the wave I'm sure you can see that this one is even harder to see take a look question what what is thie? So they're in this one for example there's the sort of little wave coming down and then there's the hit what is that? What I did point out pointed this because maybe you can explain what you think is happening here right here the previous note is ending see how it's all smooth these air tom's right? I have no idea and I think they are and probably are um it's the same for tom's and stare this if you have the previous note in fast succession, like, say, on a blast beat or something, you're going to end up with something kind of like this or any of these like that. Have you noticed there that's where it spikes up? This has a downward curve and then it spikes up suddenly, so that would be the spot this one's really obvious but notice it's going smoothly and then spikes right up there, as opposed to say where some people would think that that was it. But that's actually just following following the curve of the wave so that's not where you would do it. That makes sense as great equipment, says that's. Super helpful info right here and in russia, drum slam, you says, yeah, it really is. I've been having trouble finding the correct spot on transient, so it's it's, tough, it's, really tough, and at the end of the day, you've got to use your ears with this stuff. If if they're phasing, then you know you did it wrong. But all in all, these slides should be a good guideline for you, at least, and er in some basics.