Ah. Interested in Drum Replacement/Augmentation - with a free VST? Then...
...this may be the perfect bit of software. I've been interested in drum replacement and augmentation for a while - the idea of beefing up a bass drum two weeks after finishing recording kinda appeals to my 'I don't want to spend THAT much money' attitude at the moment, and in the past, it's advice from magazines like Sound on Sound that I've had to follow - excellent advice it was, but quite time consuming.
So on discovering this little gem, I smiled. It's KTDrumTrigger from Koen Tanghe over at those lovely people @ Smartelectronix (home of some wonderful little gems, but more on that another time). The simple idea behind it is you get a single plugin page with three separate filters - each capable of High Pass, Band Pass and Low Pass, allowing you to generate up to three distinct MIDI streams from a single, mono channel. OK, I haven't tried this on anything other than single channel files (for example, a Bass Drum channel :)), so I can't testify for its abilities to separate snares from hi-hats/cymbals, but one plugin per channel seems to work wonders. [more below :)]
It does look rather complicated, but in essense, you choose your filter, set the cutoff and Q to maximes the punch of the hit, boost/cut that point as you require, muck around with Envelope Follower settings,trigger thresholds etc, and bobs your uncle, you've god a MIDI stream that represents the Bass Drum your tracking. Just output that to a midi instrument (a la e-phonic's Drumatic 3) and you're laughing.
Obviously, you need to check for phase problems etc, but really, it seems quite easy (he says, no doubt turning up something horrendous about it in the next couple of days :)). One issue I had was on actually recording the MIDI channel rather than triggering it live. It seemed to read ahead, actually placing the MIDI hit marginally in front of the Bass Beat. Couldn't understand this, but I assume it's read-ahead vs. latency (as if I know). It only took a minute or two to fix (so, for example, I now know that on our PC, I just shift the MIDI track 'forwards' on the timeline by 107 samples, and it matches).
All in all, a fruitful experience, and I'm really looking forward to mucking around with this for triggered special effects :). Or perhaps something even more weird and wonderful has popped into the mind. Hmm.. I'll get back to you on that :).
Versions are available for PC VST and Mac PPC VST.
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