Severely distorted drum tracks

[charlievela]

I recently received a mix project for a really cool vibey Animal Collective-ish band. One problem: the drum tracks are horribly clipped. My first idea was to start sample replacing, but the level of distortion and the style of playing (lots of ghost notes) make detection problematic for both Massey DTM and Soundreplacer.

Anyone have any tips for getting useable triggers from hyper-clipped drum tracks?

[A.David.MacKinnon]

Use your ears and eyes & cut and paste. It's slow and labour intensive but it works well.

[T-rex]

Or distort them either further!

[gustavobill]

Or distort them either further!

Second that. Animal Collective has a lot of texture and ambience. try to distort the crap out of it and see what you get. I'd also try some reamping with some cool effects. AnCo did that a lot on Merriweather

[gustavobill]

Also, AnCo use lots of drum loops. If the band you're mixing use that style of songwriting, the drums should be like the repetition (a lot) of patterns (a few). In this case it shouldn't be so hard to manually replace it. Did it some times.

just grab a beer, put on a relaxing cd and shut off your brain

[MoreSpaceEcho]

i'm not the sample-replacing type so i can't help you there. but i second the distort them even more idea. or rather than distortion maybe try any kind of saturation you can, to try and soften up that super-hard clipped sound.

[ott0bot]

i'm not the sample-replacing type so i can't help you there. but i second the distort them even more idea. or rather than distortion maybe try any kind of saturation you can, to try and soften up that super-hard clipped sound.

Definately saturate! Massey Tape head can do this quite well. You can even set the Tape Head on a gated Aux send, so that only sounds over the gate threshold (ie, slightly lower than where the sound would clip) will actually get the tape saturation effect. Kinda like hitting a note harder to distort a small amp so that it breaks up nicely. You could also dump it out to a 4-track recorder(or other tape/cassette recorder) and make the clip sound a bit more of an pleasing analog distortion. The reamping method also works quite well for this. And the good news is...that these techniques should yet great results for that style of music.

[tdbajus]

Or distort them either further!

Plus you can notch filter out hits (if your kick/snare wind up not percussive enough,, run off the high end, and add it to the distorted track with the highs lopped off.