Sorry this is a longer post. I hope someone can help me with my less than ideal situation
I recently had a band come in for a full length that started drum tracking with the intention of using the same drummer for every song. But... due to the technical nature of certain parts within a given song, a different drummer (who was actually the guitar player of the band) was needed in order to play the parts accurately enough. In some extreme cases, the drum tracks for certain songs became a conglomerate of THREE different drummers, all playing the parts that they were able to play up to par. Each of these drummers have wildly different striking velocities, resulting in a somewhat disjointed sound (to say the least). The punch-ins ranged in length from entire sections of song to measure-long fills.
This is a totally less than ideal situation, but it was the only way that their drum tracks could be completed. I should mention that no amount of trying to get them to match each other's playing styles convinced them to play any differently.
In light of that, I figured that sampling the entire kit was going to be the only way to make these tracks sound cohesive enough for listeners to believe that a single drummer was playing throughout the song. However, I almost NEVER sample the snare drum and usually will do whatever I can to salvage the original snare track. FYI--I am planning to use samples that I create from the actual drums that were played and I usually use aptrigga for sampling.
The question I have is two-fold:
1) Is there any way I can salvage the original snare track? Even the tones that come out of the drum are very different from player to player... Also, one drummer was heavy handed on the drums, and the other on the cymbals, so the bleed in the snare track sounds really different as well... What can I do to unify it, if anything? I've tried every conventional method I can think of with poor results.
2) If I do have to sample the snare track, how do I make certain that each hit is phase coherent? What if one hit that I chop up is a few wave cycles off from another hit that I chop up to make the samples? I still feel like there might be an element of human error even if I zoom in as far as I can and chop from the first visible sign of the transient.
Any suggestions, tips, or information would be helpful, and thanks for taking the time to read this!
Steve
