Mixing drums by replacing drums

When mixing drums, you want to have the best recorded ingredients possible. You can't use poorly recorded drum sounds and expect a great drum mix to come out of it. It's a futile effort to try to squeeze a great drum sound out of a crappy drum-kit and sometimes you have to use other efforts to get a better sound.

Drum replacement is a great tool to use when you've been handed a song that has a drum sound that sounds so bad you'd rather scrap the whole thing and record anew. The are some powerful drum replacement tools in most audio programs. In Pro-Tools, we have Beat Detective for instance. In Logic Pro 9 we have a powerful drum replacer as well. But in the previous versions of Logic there isn't any drum replacement tool that you can use when mixing drums. We have to get by using another function in Logic. The Audio To Score function.

In a tutorial at Audiotuts+, written by yours truly, I demonstrate how to use the audio to score function in order to replace your drums sounds and make your drum mixing experience more enjoyable.

Here is an excerpt from the tutorial

"The basic rhythm track drives the song forward, and everything else builds upon it. You may have written your song on an acoustic guitar and laid that down first, but drums are usually the backbone of a song, keeping everything well structured and grooving. But what if you don’t know how to record drums? Or you end up with someone’s recording that’s so bad that you’d rather tap pencils on your desk. Drum replacement may be an option.

Recently we showed you how to use Logic Pro 9’s Drum Replacer. This tutorial covers a technique that allows you to fix drum tracks by replacing the drums using previous versions on Logic.

In the following tutorial we’ll be looking into Logic’s Audio to Score function as a way to replace drums. We’ll see how to transform your drum hits to MIDI and then replace them with a better sounding sample."

Read the full thing here.

When mixing drums, it's obvious we need to use whatever means possible to get the best sounding mix out of our tracks. Sometimes that means re-recording ad infinitum or sometimes that means studio magic like drum replacement. 

Whatever means you use to get to your desired end, just make sure that whoever you are working for is happy. Sound engineering and mixing is a service industry, and with a constant stream of happy clients leaving your studio you can be sure to get a good word out for future projects.

Not mixing drums yet? Check out these drum recording techniques

Use the parametric equalizer for a different kick drum sound

Use buss compression for tighter and punchier drums

Mixing Strategies - Planning the Perfect Mix

Mixing Strategies is an ebook that focuses on the important subjective parts of mixing music. It teaches you the philosophies of mixing and how to approach your next mixing project for a successful outcome. Get your copy of this invaluable ebook now

Disclaimer! This article is old, go to the new Audio Issues Website here

Check this out!

Need to stay productive and organized in the studio?

Grab your copy of Audio Notes, the handy audio production notebook right here