Recording Drum Samples

In total Harry and I recorded 3 different drum kits with a hard, medium and soft velocity layer for each drum. On some drums we recorded different types of hits like on the snare we recorded some crack shots and rims, and on the hats we recorded hitting it with different parts of the stick. We had 3 studio sessions just for recording these drum samples and most of them went for over 5 hours each. We decided to do the drum recording sessions in pro tools since we were both comfortable recording and editing drums in this DAW.

Guitar Amp Impulse Responses

Harry and I created impulse responses for 3 different guitar amp cabinets including a Boss Katana, a Victory V112v Kraken and an Orange Pro Crush CR120c. We recorded sine sweeps to capture the frequency spectrum of the amplifiers and loaded the IR's into a convolution reverb, played a guitar track through it and we didn't really hear much of a tonal difference. After thinking for a while, we tried using a pre built amp preset in Ableton and it made all the difference. At this point we decided that we would use the amp preset and create the pedals using Ableton Live plug ins and assigning their parameters to different macros.

Creating The Demo Track

This section of the project was pretty easy, Harry recorded the guitar track and created the MIDI for the drums at home, I was going to record the bass at home and send it to him but my bass was out of order. Instead I recorded the bass on campus, we used Harry's Scarlett 2i2 audio interface and plugged SAE's Squire bass into it, we recorded the bass in just a few takes and at the time didn't notice any problems. Later on however, Harry noticed some weird clicks and pops in the audio that shouldn't have been there. We tried recording again, this time in the Neve and we plugged the bass into one of the TLA compressors on the effects rack, this gave the bass a bit more colour. The bass turned out perfect and now all we had to do was add the effects and drum machine to the session once they were finished.

Building The Drum Machine

First I edited all of the drum samples that we had recorded previously, I normalised the volume of each sample according to the velocity and then applied an EQ using audio suite in Pro Tools. I then imported the edited samples into Ableton Live and placed each type of drum into a sampler within a cell of a drum rack, I then edited the velocity and sample selection mapping in the zones of each sampler then assigned the sample selectors to macros to make it more user friendly.

Harrison Ivers worked on the guitar pedal board creation for the assignment so you can check that out on his page.

This project was quite an experience, I got to learn new skills doing things like creating impulse responses and building a drum machine, but I also got to sharpen the skills that I already had doing things like recording, editing and setting up microphones. I only first heard about the concept of impulse responses shortly before deciding that this was what I wanted to do for my major work. Since Harry wanted to do the same thing and we know that we work well together and bounce off of each others ideas quite well we decided to tackle this project together. Just creating the impulse responses could have easily been a 1 person job which is what made us come up with these other parts to the project, like the drum sampling. I honestly think that if I was working on this project by myself and the impulse responses didn't work I wouldn't have known where to go from there, luckily I had Harry to brainstorm a solution with and we still had the drum samples if everything else went wrong. The drum machine is something that I will definitely use after this project is done, I've been using the same drum samples in my music for ages and I always wanted to record my kit for those tracks, now I have a great way to easily replace the drum samples since they're written in MIDI and it will sound great.

I think that for once my time management was actually great during this project, we made mistakes, made changes and had to re do some things and yet we still finished with a great end result and time to spare. This has been something that I have struggled with a lot in the past and I still do in other aspects of my school work and my life, but having this feeling of accomplishment and knowing that I've finished and not having to rush at the end and do everything at the last minute has definitely helped me to see the benefits of keeping to a schedule to a certain degree and not procrastinating. There were a few things that didn't go exactly as we expected them to, the big one that I've already talked about quite a bit was the impulse responses but we learned from that experience and adapted to our new circumstances. Then there were so many tiny trouble shooting things that I can't even think of all of them like we only got sound in one ear when making a headphone mix but we figured out it was the jacks on the headphone box and other small things like having to set all of our amps at the same volume when they were all different a wattage and one was a valve amp.

Another big one was the round robin, originally we wanted to create a round robin for our drum machine so that it would pick 1 of 3 drum samples at the same velocity to play, this effect would have added to the complexity and uniqueness of our drum machine but unfortunately there simply was enough time, I know that I just said how great my time management was but there we other factors too. We had plenty of drum samples recorded, we probably could have made a round robin that used 5 or 6 different samples for the same hit, but during the editing process I used normalize in Pro Tools audio suite, and since all of our samples for each velocity were recorded on the same audio file I was unable to normalize the same file if it was chopped up into separate pieces. I would have had to choose the samples I wanted to use, chop them up and one at a time export, save them and name them so that I knew which samples they were. Then I would have had to import them back into Pro Tools and normalize and EQ 3 times the amount of samples that I already did which took me around 8 hours. Technically speaking I did have time to do this but with all of my other work I would have been on my computer 24/7 and I don't think I have the mental capacity to handle that. As well as all of this Ableton Live isn't very compatible with round robin and that was our final platform for delivery, we couldn't switch to another DAW this late into the project and there were so many key features like sampler,drum racks and macros that it would have been counter productive to change.

If I did this project again I would have loved to work on building the guitar pedals and all the macros for the impulse responses and amps heads, I'm sure that Harry would have liked to play around with the drum machine too, maybe not editing the drum samples though. It would have been amazing if both of us could have worked on everything together but it just seemed like the sensible thing to do to split the work load and let each person focus on one aspect of the project. Over all I'm thrilled with how this project turned out, it was a great challenge and I really learned a lot from it, I'm sure that I'll be working on similar projects in the future and I think that this was a great way to get my foot in the door for creating virtual and sampled instruments.