HOW TO TURN AUDIO DRUMS INTO MIDI! (a guide for dummies)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

In this article we are going to discover an interesting way to use our drum replacers, such as ApTrigga or Drumagog (click here to discover what they are).

Let's imagine one of these 3 scenarios (but there may be many others): 

1) we have a set of not so good drum microphones and no trigger but we would like to record the performance of our drummer and give it a good sound.

2)  we want to record our drummer in acoustic but at the same time we want the editing flexibility of a MIDI track.

3) we want to keep our acoustic drum tracks, but at the same time we want to add drum samples to fatten the sound.

In all these three situations we need first to load a drum replacer on each track we want to turn into a MIDI (for example one for the snare and one for the kick track), and then set it (usually with the threshold control) in a way that lets it detect only the transient of the drum part we need (and ignores the bleed of the other drum parts). 

With the Velocity control (or equivalent), instead, we will set the dynamic range that our drum replacing software will translate from the audio track to the MIDI one.

Last, we must tell our drum replacer also to which note of the piano roll send the impulse, in order to avoid sending a snare inpulse in the kick key (which is usually C1) or vice versa.

Now we can create a MIDI track for each drum part we need (for example one for the snare and one for the kick) and choose as input source for the MIDI track the drum replacer of the desired drum part (es. Drumagog).

Now if we arm the MIDI track and press Record, it should play the whole song and record in the MIDI track (or tracks) all the impulses taken from the drum replacer software, so that at the end of the song we'll have a MIDI track with all the kick hits and another one with all the snare hits (obviously kick and snare are just an example, we could choose to trigger only the toms and it would be identical).

Now we can reunite all those MIDI tracks in one single MIDI, so that we'll need just one drum sampler to play the whole set, thus saving resources; in order to obtain this we can drag and drop the various MIDI tracks into one, being careful of having them starting all at the same point.

Once we have our "MIDI drum track" reconstructed with all the parts (in some Daw we're gonna need to use the Paste tool to merge the tracks) we need we can load our favourite Drum sampler and choose a sound we like.

The last operation is (if we feel we need it) to Edit our MIDI drum track to perfection, correcting timing errors, the strenght of the hits and so on.

Hope this was helpful!

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