… When It’s another drum, recorded by someone else.

Yes, the magic of drum replacement.

Well. As I hinted in the previous mail, it turns out that my drum recording skills leave something to be desired, which means that I have not quite realised my vision of awesome rock drums recorded in a big room. To be honest, the kick drum tracks sound a little like a cardboard box, and the snare just lacks that snap that cuts through the mix.  Luckily, I have some pretty neat performances from Paul, and now I’ve pretty much edited out the odd bum hit, corrected the odd timing error with Logic’s Flex Audio feature, and comped the drum tracks on 6 of the 7 tracks, I’ve turned my attention to drum replacement.

Now while I might not have the requisite mics or years of experience in  placing them, or thousands of pounds worth of mic preamps, converters and what have you, Steven Slate has all these things, and a drop dead gorgeous collection of the best drums ever made, which he’s meticulously recorded to 24 track tape in a pro studio with the best mics available, processed with some wonderful high end outboard, converted with some high end D-A and created a set of drum samples that are in demand from some of the hottest  producers out there.

So, on to Logic’s Drum replacement facility. Well, I read the manual, I watched some tutorials, and it looks quite simple.  In fact, this Youtube video makes it look so easy:

Right!

What I found was that the ‘Threshold’ control actually seems to have an almost random effect on which hits to choose and which to ignore.  Meaning that to ensure that you get all the hits that are real drum hits, you get lots of ghost notes where the replacer has chosen to trigger off a bit of bleed-through from another drum at a much lower level.

In the end the solution was to insert a noise gate, gate the track really heavily to get only the drum hit you are after, and then bounce the track to a temporary track which the drum replacement algorithm can work on.  In other words: it’s taking ages!

But we’re getting there. I’ve been burning the midnight oil, and all but A Day by the Sea are done…  And I think the final result is turning out to be rather tasty.

This week I’ve mostly been mixing.

Clearly these aren’t final mixes but I needed to do this to get the tracks a bit more streamlined, bouncing MIDI virtual instrument parts down to real audio, all in preparation for moving the logic project files over to the portable hard drive.

This is so that I can easily move between the studio iMac and the Macbook Pro (which now is fully ‘Logiced-Up’ ) for the big drum recording session which is tomorrow. Yay!

Along the way, I’ve taken the time to do some editing and mixing following the last two sessions with Andy and Adam, and I am really happy with the Acoustic parts in Together and A Day by the Sea, and the new bass parts in ADBTS have really lifted the feel, particularly in the 6/8 instrumental.

Also coming under scrutiny were the big multi-tracked vocal harmonies in Children of a Forgotten Sun, Don’t Give Up on Love and ADBTS . I have created vocal groups in each case and used Logic’s Focusrite compressor model in each case.  This has helped to blend the vocals together in a really lovely way.

So the tracks are now all on the portable firewire drive, the MacBook has had the Alesis mixer drivers installed. I have all the mics ready and cabling up together.  So hopefully my next entry will be all about drums.

I received a whole bunch of guitar tracks from Nick Crosby on Friday, these are all the separate guitar parts for Children of a Forgotten Sun.  Basically, when Nick did the parts for that song originally, he provided me three guitar stems, the lead stem, and two rhythm stems, however, the lead stem contained a composite of three distinct guitar parts, which at one or two points play counterpoint to each other in a rather great Steve Howe-esque way.

Having these as separate parts has given me quite a lot more choices for the mix, including panning and different processing with Logic’s rather tasty Amp Designer.

But there are a lot of guitars here, and it’s a long song – the longest on the album, topping out at around 13 minutes (well, this is prog after all!) – so I took most of the weekend chopping up the parts, deleting the silence between sections, colour coding stuff so I could make sense of what was where, and then started in on the processing and balancing.  There is a fine line between an immense wall of sound and descending into mush, and I’m not sure I’ve pulled that particular trick off yet.

And I’ve decided that the intro vocals now sound distinctly wimpy in comparison, so that has gone back onto the list for re-tracking.

Busy, busy, busy.