HOW TO USE DRUMAGOG AND THE OTHER DRUM REPLACERS (free Vst plugins and samples inside)

Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're going to talk about Drum Replacement!

Drum replacement is a very common technique nowadays, and it consists in taking the peaks of a drum track (an audio track, or even a MIDI) using a level analizer, setting a threshold like we're using a Compressor, and every peak that exceedes that threshold is considered by the program a hit to be replaced with a midi sample of our choice.

This technique can be used to replace virtually anything with any sample, but it has been developed specifically for drums, because this is the application where it really turns out to be useful: to add the sound of an already processed snare, kick or tom to the original sound we have recorded and blend them, in order to give more punch, clarity and "professional vibe" to our songs.

Those plugins usually gives you the opportunity to "refine the search" of the peaks to be replaced, supporting Equalization filters and a volume fader, in order to isolate as much as possible the range of sounds to be processed, since it's a common problem to have replaced more sounds that we need, for example a long-tailed snare hit may be interpreted as more than one single sound so the plugin may add a double or triple hit on it. It takes some practice to set up the software so that only the sounds we need are replaced.

- The first and best drum replacement program around is Drumagog, it comes with some sample bundled sample and lets you use Wave files and the proprietary .GOG standard, which supports multisampling in order to assign the right sample according to the Velocity of every hit.

Another very interesting and useful feature is the "Blend" control, that lets you choose the percentage of original and triggered sound you want, mixing them.

- The second plugin I suggest is Slate Drums, which is a bit more expensive but comes in bundle with great samples.

- The third plugin in order of quality is ApTrigga, which is cheap, light, and very effective.

- Drumtrig, is FREE, and very easy to use. Similiarly to Aptrigga, Drumtrig has a clean interface, but with less controls.

- Boxsounds Replacer, is FREE and lets you load up to four sample layers.

- KTDrum Trigger is another FREE plugin that allows you replace sounds, and this one supports up to three different frequency bands, thus is possible to replace more than one sound at the same time (anyway is suggested to open a single instance for every single drum part, to avoid errors).

Now we must choose the right samples. There are many sample packs around, and among them a very good pack is LSD DRUMS, or the Slate Drums pack, but surfing the web you can also stumble upon some good free sample library, just try searching on the Ultimate Metal and the Mixingtips forum. You can even create your own samples by microphoning a real drum or ripping the single samples from your favourite album, just make sure to find a song where the drum part is playing alone, or you will sample something of the other instruments too!

Once we have replaced all the drum parts we need (usually snare, kick and toms, since is not a good idea to replace the cybmals as the sampled ones tend to sound a bit "unnatural"), it's time to head to the "cleaning" part: clean all the midi drum tracks of the "double hits" accidentally taken by the software, correct the eventual timing and quantization errors (if the samples are replacing a real microphoned drum track), adjust the Velocity to the right levels when needed (just remember to not make it completely flat or you will lose all the dynamics of the drumming), and after this phase we will have a perfectly edited triggered drum track, which is ready to be mixed (and with the right samples, more than 50% of the mixing job is already done!).

Click here for a tutorial on How to use Superior Drummer and Slate Drums samples with drum replacers!

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HOW TO DO PANNING - STEREO DISPOSITION OF THE MIX (a guide for dummies)

Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're going to talk about Stereo Disposition on a mix.
The moment when we usually decide the position of the single instruments in our mix's spectrum usually happens right after the Project Preparation phase, at the beginning of mixing, in the "Balancing Phase", the phase where, without using any plugin, we just try to move the volume faders up and down in order to find a good balance between the tracks, and take note of the tracks that feels "unstable": those tracks that we cannot just let sit in the mix on a single fader position, and that will require further processing in order to find their place.
It's a good idea to listen the mix in mono before starting panning (and check again at the end of the mixing phase too) in order to see if there is any Phase Cancellation, that may go unnoticed once the project is panned, but that can create problems (Click Here to read an article about Phase Analizers).

"To pan" an instrument means to set it on a position in the mix that can range anywhere from 100% left, to 100% right: if we put a track on a position that is (for example) 75% left, means that 75% of the sound will come out from the left speaker, and 25% will come from the right one, thus this sound will result closer to the listener than a 100% left sound.
We can play with the disposition in order to help every instrument to sit better in the mix, and give to the listener the feeling to be "surrounded" by the atmosphere of the song, or make him feel like he's in the middle of the rehearsal room, or even to have something that is moving from one side to another of the "soundstage". The creative uses of stereo dispositions are countless, and some of the first pioneers of stereoscopy have been Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, while the first Beatles albums were originally recorded in mono.

Let's start by saying, as already stated on our Stereo Expander article (Click Here to check it out!) that Low frequencies are non-directional, while highs are very directional. As a result, pan low frequency sounds (kick drum, Bass) toward the center of a mix, and higher frequency instruments (shaker, tambourine, cymbals) further out to the left and right.

- Drumset: there are Two "schools": the "Performer Perspective" and the "Concert Perspective". I personally prefer the first one, as the second one is generally used just in certain live recordings: to set the "Performer Perspective", pan Snare and Kick to the centre, the Hi-Hat slightly to the left, the Ride to the right, and set the toms at the disposition you would find while playing the drumset. Finally, set the OverHead Microphones should be set pretty wide, often one full left and one full right. To give the "Concert Perspective", instead, just flip the left and right sides, as if someone else is playing and you're in front of the set, facing it :)

- Vocals: It's a good idea to set the lead vocals on the centre of the soundstage, and so the backing vocals, but if there is more than one backing voice you can set them one sligthly left (like 27%) and one slightly right; just remember that is a good idea to keep them balanced in the mix, unless you are not aiming to some particular effect. You can also try to pan two copies of the lead voice slightly left and right and "slip" one of them forward in the timeline of a few milliseconds: you will obtain a particular "chorus-like" effect that is sometimes heard on some commercial song.

- Guitars: the most common technique is to pan a rhythm guitar to the left (usually 60% to 95%) and one to the right (someone even pan them 100% per side), and if you feel that there's still a void around the centre, you can record a third guitar track and leave it to the centre, or copy the two guitar tracks and paste them to the centre of the spectrum (or a bit off centre, e.g. you can put the left guitar copy at 70% right, and the right guitar copy at 70% left) lowering them of 5-6 db, just to "beef up" the mix. The lead guitars are usually panned to the centre, as long as there is no voice on that part of the song, otherwise we can set them slightly aside, in order to avoid them to interfere with the vocals.
Sometimes it's better to pan 95% left and right instead of 100% because on some car stereo system guitars panned full left and right tend to sound a bit too far.

- Keyboards / Orchestrations: It's common use to pan the background pads or violins to the extremes, while treating the leads (whether they are orchestral leads/hits or synth leads) like solo instruments, so put them in the centre, or just slightly off-centre if the middle of the soundstage is too crowded; just a few points (like 5%) can make an instrument to interfere with the others.

- Addictional Awesomeness: there are some effects that lets you play with stereophony, such as the Ping Pong delay (a delay whose repetitions bounces from left to right, and that has to be loaded on a stereo track), but if you want a track, a virtual instrument or just an effect to MOVE inside of a song, you can Automate it (Click Here for an article about Automations!).


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HOW TO USE AUTOTUNE (free VST plugins inside)

Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're going to talk about how to correct the pitch of vocals, or any other instrument. These pitch correction tools are usually plugins that takes a wave sound and drag it as it was a midi sample, higher or lower on the piano roll in order to match the correct note you need. 

In the last few years the technology has been developed in order to limit the inevitable degradation of a sound that is pitch shifted, especially when applied the vocal parts, which are the ones where the pitch correction is more noticed: today the pitch correction is blended with the introduction of a synth line almost inaudible right below the vocal, in order to help it to sound more "in tune". 

Obviously the pitch correction part should be seen as a "last resort", to use only if you notice, before starting the mixing phase, that there are some errors that cannot be recorded again, but that at the same time are too big to not be noticed, and that risk to ruin the song.
First off let's say that auto tuning tools works fine only with clean, monophonic sounds: any kind of background noise, or rasp vocals, or distorted sound may be misinterpreted by the algorithm and lead to mistakes. It's also suggestable to process the vocal parts without sibilant letters (s), and the guitar - bass parts where there are no slides-bendings.

There are two types of autotuning tools:

1) Automated Pitch Correctors: These are the kind of tools, such as Antares Autotune, or the free Gsnap and Kerovee, where you can choose the key of the song and other parameters, and let the plugin to automatically slide the wave on the piano roll, in order to match in real time the scale used on the song. It's a good thing not to leave it activated for the whole song, but to Automate it in order to be switched on only when needed, and turned off when unnecessary. It is also possible to create a MIDI track and route the plugin on it in order to manually decide the pitch as it was a regular synth, in facts today the industry standard is using Autotune manually, line by line, in Graphic Mode.

2) Pre - Scanning Pitch Correctors: These plugins, such as Waves Tune and Celemony Melodyne, works by pre-scanning the track and creating a "MIDI-like" version of the track itself inside their interface, so that you can use real-time autotuning (like an automated pitch corrector), or correct the pitch manually without creating an external midi track. Offline working (which means "not in real time") takes more time and efforts, but usually leads to a better result, since it leaves to you the decision of which single syllable (or even part of it) to be processed and which not. With the best Pre - Scanning pitch correctors, such as Melodyne, it's also possible to modify the single notes of a chord of an Acoustic Guitar, for example, just like a Midi file.

The famous/infamous "Cher effect" present on the song "Believe" has been obtained by forcing the vocals through wrong scales, or manually writing notes for the voice in order create that unnatural-sounding "glitch" (obviously in this case it has been an arrangement choice, but sometimes it's just a pure error).

In conclusion, regardless to the kind of plugin you may choose, autotuning should be used with extreme caution, only when impossible to record again, and only for the single parts that really needs it, since often is better to hear a more natural interpretation, although not perfectly in tune, than the "Midi-sounding" voice that sometimes can be heard, even on commercial songs. The risk is to have a completely flattened and lifeless voice, altough perfectly in tune :)

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PROJECT PREPARATION (what to do before starting mixing)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!! Today we're going to talk about how to prepare your project before starting mixing, and how to organize your layout in order to not go completely mad with the Daw interface, making the workflow easier, faster and more CPU friendly.
We can create a single project for each song or use one project for all songs (click here for a dedicated article).
Assuming that you have imported (or Recorded) on you project all the tracks you need, these are the steps to follow:

1) Step One - Track Naming and Disposition: The best way to start is to name every track with a name that makes it easy to find even in the most clogged workflow, for example "Lead Vocals", "Rhythm Guitar Left", "Rhythm Guitar Right", and so on, then organize their disposition in groups of tracks by dragging them higher or lower in the layout, for example many studios starts with the Drum Tracks, and Colour them with the same Colour, then the Bass Tracks, and choose a different colour, then the Guitar Tracks, with another colour, then the ‘extra’ instruments (keyboards, strings…) and finally the vocal tracks. Click here for a dedicated tutorial on how to Create a Template for your DAW.

2) Step Two - Group Channel Tracks: now that we have all of the single tracks in order, we will find that we have, for example, four guitar tracks that shares the same settings, the same eq and volume, and the same effect chain, four vocal tracks, ten drum tracks and two bass tracks. Instead of effecting and applying the same settings on any single track, multiplying the Cpu load and the the waste of time, we can create Group Channel Tracks in order to apply the same settings to all the similiar tracks that we have, for example we can create a Vocal Group, a Drum Group and so on, and we can even create Sub Groups that goes into other Groups. If you Mute or Solo a Group Channel, all the tracks routed on it will be affected. If you need, you can also Link Channels, so that if you move the Volume Fader, Solo or Mute one channel, it will affect all the linked ones. Click here for a dedicated tutorial on how to use Group Channel Tracks and How to Link Channels. 

3) Step Three - Editing: Now it's time to cut every background noise in between of the played parts in the audio tracks of our project, since noise it's useless and harmful, especially in projects with many tracks: the noise present on every track will sum up, to the point that it will be really tedious. Once we have got rid of the noise, it's time to do some Time Editing: we can improve the timing of anything, from drums, to vocals, to the single guitar strums, by cutting the track at the Zero Point, which is the 0db area before the start of a sound, and moving the area forward or backward in order to match the other instruments (usually the drums). If you select the "Snap to Grid" button, the cursor will snap the selected sound to the MIDI grid, which can be divided in 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and so on, in order to be more precise for the positioning. If you feel that for example the vocals on the first chorus are way better than the ones of the second chorus, you can copy and paste the first chorus vocals on the second too, in order to improve what cannot be recorded again. For more info, check out the dedicated article about Editing!

4) Step four - Pitch Shifting / Autotuning: Once everything is perfectly organized and routed, and all the audio tracks are finely edited and in timed one another, it's time to check out the tuning, especially of the Vocals, but also for example for Bass or Guitars (although tuning software works well almost exclusively with Clean or Acoustic Guitars). For more info, Click Here to read the dedicated Article about Autotuning!

Once you have found the layout best fitting your needs, you can also Save it as a Template, so that your next projects will be even faster and smoother!

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MIDI Dynamics: How to adjust the Velocity (for more realistic MIDI drums)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about how to adjust/edit the Velocity parameter on a MIDI track!

The first MIDI samplers used to have just one sample for every sound (e.g. the legendary Roland TR-808, a hardware drum sampler with just one snare sample, one kick sample...), but through the years we've seen the arrival of always more accurate samplers, so now we have available huge libraries of sounds, and the most recent drum sequencers (which today are almost completely VST based) have many samples for each drum piece, (talking about Virtual Drums, but the same is for any other virtual instrument), divided by how hard the "virtual hand" would hit them, in order to give a more realistic result. 

Velocity is the intensity, the strenght of the "virtual hand" that hit the drum piece, and today it's an editable parameter, created in order to give a better realism to the MIDI instruments. Some MIDI instruments according to the Velocity you choose will choose the right sample, while others (the ones with fewer samples, or with just one) will apply an Envelope Filter on the sample in order to make it sound quieter or louder; eventually many MIDI instruments will apply a combination of these two methods.

Today, most of the commercial DAWs features a Velocity Editor (for example, in the Cubase/Nuendo interface is located on the lower side of the Piano Roll editor window), so you can manually choose the intensity of each hit: just select the midi part you've created on the Piano Roll, and it will select automatically the Velocity on the lower window (on the side menu you can decide the parameter to edit: Velocity, or Volume, or any other); 

from here, using the Pencil Tool you can move up or down the bar, and the higher it will be set, the louder the Velocity will be.

If you keep the left button of the mouse pressed you can trim the Velocity of all the notes in the Piano Roll if you want (e.g. creating a "Fade In Effect"), or just choose some of them to adjust and leave the others untouched. Many MIDI instruments features also a "Humanize" control (e.g. you can find it on the Toontrack drum sequencers), which automatically randomizes for example the velocity of the drum hits in order to make them sound more natural.

- HOW TO SET A MINIMUM AND MAXIMUM VELOCITY FOR THE RANDOMIZER: If you have a randomic velocity on your drum sequencer (or any other VST instrument), but you wish to set a minimum and/or a maximum Velocity so that the hits won't be weaker and/or stronger than a certain threshold, select the MIDI track and go to the MIDI Modifiers section: from here on the Random menu, choose "Velocity" and you'll be able to set a Minimum and a Maximum (from -120 to +120), so that all the hits on that track will respect that threshold.

- HOW TO SET A FIXED VELOCITY: If you want a Fixed Velocity, instead, just select on the MIDI Modifiers section the amount you want on the Velocity section (from -126 to +126), now all the new notes you will write on the Piano Roll will have the selected Velocity, and to set it on the notes already written, just select them, Right Click->Functions->Fixed Velocity.

More info on how to randomize the Midi Velocity properly can be found HERE.

- Addictional Awesomeness: Some quick tip to make a sampled drum track more realistic, by adjusting the Velocity. First off visualize how to play the parts you are going to write: nobody wants to listen to drums played unnaturally, just because the guy who wrote the part is not a drummer and has no clue of how to play it :D 

Then when writing a drum roll, think of which hand does each single hit, and make the hits with the right hand slighly harder than the ones made with the left hand (assuming that the drummer is right-handed), plus make the drum roll start harder and then get progressively softer as it ends.

When making a press roll part, or a blast beat part, lower the velocity of the snare, and raise it just on the accents, plus raise it progressively when heading toward a Drum Roll, or to a Fill, and remember that a real drummer usually the faster he goes the lighter he hits, in order to control better the movement of the sticks, and to save his stamina ;)

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How to use Automations and the Tempo Track (a guide for dummies)

Hello and welcome to this week's article! Today we're going to talk about Automations in Steinberg Cubase and Nuendo.

An Automation is a system which will memorize and playback the whole variations we make, applied to the different parameters of the mixboard: volume, Panning, Eq, effect level, etc

Do you want the volume on your lead guitar to raise on a certain point of the song? 

Or the volume of lead vocals to raise a little during the chorus in order to make it stand out more?

Well it's not a difficult task, let's see how to do it :)

I'm using the Cubase/Nuendo interface as an example, but the same mechanism can be applied on most of the recent DAWs.

In each channel of our virtual mixer there are (among the others) two buttons: W (Write) and R (Read): 

we can press W, then playback the song and modify in real time any parameter of our song (for example the volume fader, or the settings of some plugin, e.g. an Equalizer), then we stop the song, and disable the W button, so that only the R button is on (this button must stay always enabled, if we disable it, the channel will ignore any automation set so far); 

now if we playback the same part, we will see the parameters modify automatically exactly as we did in the "writing" mode.

Click here for an article about the Marquee tool / Smart tool for a faster way to write automations!

This is the way to set manually in real time the automation, but we can also just write it (or modify an automation already created in real time) pressing the "+" button on the channel: 

this way we will be able to see all the settings of the channel, automated and not automated.

Using the "Pencil" tool, we can now create new automations or modify/correct the ones we've already done, by creating points and moving around the lines between these points, for example if we create a "slope" line on the "Volume" parameter, we can create a Fade Out effect. 

Practice around to discover all the various parameters you can automate!

Click here for an article about "riding the volume fader"!

- Addictional Awesomess: Usually on a project the tempo is set to "Fixed" (you can see it on the Transport Bar), which means that the metronome is set for just one speed for the whole project, but what happens if we want to use one single project for more than one song, just using the same channels, and the two songs uses a different tempo? 

Or what happens if we just want to throw in a tempo change inside a single song? 

How can we tell the DAW to change the metronome tempo from a certain measure on? 

Well, there is an Automation for this too :)

Click on "Fixed" to change it to "Track", and press CTRL+T to open the "Tempo Track".

This will open a timeline where, using the Pencil tool, we can create points, in order to change the tempo on a certain point of the project, so ad example, once the song 1 is finished, for example, at the measure n.200, we can change the tempo here in order to have the right click for the song 2, from the measure n.201 on. 

We can also create "ramps" of metronome, in order to give a "speeding up" or "slowing down" effect, that will obviously affect all the other plugins and virtual instruments, especially the Delay speed and the Drum Sequencers!

If we want to change the tempo from 4/4 to another time signature (e.g. 7/8), instead, we must always use the pencil tool in our tempo track, clicking at the right measure in the grey bar right below the tempo meter, on the upper side of the screen, and we'll be able to type with our keyboard the time signature to be used from that measure on. 

Another interesting feature of Steinberg products it's the "Musical Note" icon featured on Midi tracks: if it is engaged, if we change metronome, all the notes in the piano roll will be quantized according to the new tempo, if it is disengaged instead (it becomes a grey clock icon), the grid will change, but the notes will remain where they were. 

Hope this article was helpful!

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Group Channel Tracks and FX Channel Tracks quick tutorial

Hello and welcome to this week's tutorial! Today we're going to talk about how to use Group channel tracks and FX Channel tracks on your DAW.
We'll use as example the standard Cubase / Nuendo interface (two of the most commonly used DAWs),  but the same mechanism can be applied to almost every other DAW.
The idea is to avoid applying the same effects to every channel we need, thus losing time, cpu and ram usage, and to have a cleaner and easier-to-mix interface, by creating groups of channels that shares the same effects chain, using just a single effect instance, applied to more than one channel.

- Group Channel Tracks: just click to Project->Add Channel->Group Channel Track (stereo, if you're not going to route on it just mono instruments, or you wish to use stereo effects like the "ping pong" delay, or you want to pan the single stereo instruments on different positions), name it as you want (for example "Rhythm Guitars", or "Lead Vocals") and then select on the Output Routing of each channel you want to route into this Group channel track, the name of the Group Channel Track we've just created.
Now that we have all the desired tracks routed on our Group Channel Track, we will notice that if we Mute or Solo the Group channel track, all the single routed tracks will be affected, and the same will happen moving the volume fader, or creating Automations. Obviously on the "insert" section of this Group Channel we'll be able to put any effect, for example a reverb or a compressor, and it will be applied to all the tracks passing through this channel.
You can also route a Channel Group (i.e. cymbals) into another Channel Group (i.e. Whole Drumset), but only if the last channel group (i.e. Whole Drumset) is created for last; for some reason in facts, if you create a new channel group and try to send it into an older one, on some DAWs this will not be possible.

- Fx Channel Tracks: these tracks are not whole channels, but just simple effect chains (or FX buss) that can be sent to the "effects loop" (send/return) of all the single tracks we want, choosing the amount of it to be sent to each track (which can't be done with a Group Channel track). Let's click to Project->Add Channel->Fx Channel Track (stereo, for the same reason explained above). Let's name the track the way we want (i.e. Vocals), and this will create another Channel called Fx Channel, with all of the classic inserts, where we can load all the effects we need, for example a Reverb (but obviously we can choose more than just one effect).
Now, if we open the tracks we need to be effected, in this case our vocal tracks, we can load in the "Fx Sends" section the FX Channel Track we've just created.
In order to choose the amount of effect to be applied on this track, we will move the volume fader just below the slot in the "Fx Sends" section of the track; the orange button above the slot selects if this FX buss is applied Pre Fader or Post Fader. If it's On, the effect is post fader, so the amount of effect applied in not modified by the track fader: the effect is sent as the fader is always set on 0db.
Now we must send this FX track on the "FX send" slot of all the tracks we want it to be applied, and we're done :)

If you want to learn how we can use the insert of an FX channel track, click here!

- Additional Awesomeness - Linking Channels: From the Mixer Interface (just press F3), hold the Ctrl button and select more than one channel to have them selected at the same time, then right click on one on those and choose "Link Channels": from now if you Mute, Solo or change the volume on one channel, this will affect all the linked ones. If you want to modify just one of the linked channels without removing the link between them, you can do it by holding the Alt button, this way the change will affect only the select channel. In order to remove the link, just right click on one of the linked channels and choose "Unlink Channels".

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