Using a G2 Engine as a drum retrigger-er?

[hyperstationjr]

I have a recording session coming up in a month, it's a death metal band, and they want really nice sounding bass kicks for their songs. Because of a bad room, bad mics and bad drum kit, I figure re-triggering the drums with samples might be the best option. However, I never did this, and don't have the equipment to do it, nor does the studio I work at.

My question, could I get the Nord G2 to do this accurately, and to send audio into it, then have a patch convert the signals into Midi to send over to an MPC or Battary?

Anyone do this already? Is it accurate enough??

[mosc]

I've seen the G2 used this way. Maybe Zynthetix will chime in if he's around. He does this all the time.

There are G2 modules for envelope detection and pitch detection. You could use it as an audio to MIDI device quite well. There are four separate input channels so you have four circuits.

There will always be some delay when you detect and audio signal and send out a MIDI, but I suspect it will be quite workable.

[jksuperstar]

Yes, combinations of filters and/or pitch/note detection works well. Success is somewhat dependant on wether you are doing this triggering on drums that are tracked seperately, or if you are taking a stereo mix, and decoding drums from that.

I imagine in a studio, you could account for delays introduced by the MIDI conversion process and sample triggering. I guess that depends if you do this stuff off-line, or if you do it during the recording process.

[zynthetix]

If you're only doing this to the bass drum, it should be a piece of cake. Just patch the mic in to a level detector or pitch tracker (using gate out) and plug that into a midi note or control send. If you're doing more than one drum this could be trickier...I think you'd have to use some sort of pitch discrimination with the drums....like put every drum mic into a mixer, take the mixer's main outs into the G2, then set up a bunch of band pass filters from that source...so one band pass is set exclusively to let the snare's frequency response through, another for the bass drum, etc. Then take these signals and route each one into a envelope follower or pitch tracker and route them respectively to their own midi note or control send modules.

I haven't tried anything quite like this, but it sounds like a neat idea. Even some interesting sound design could result from mixing part of the band-pass acoustic signal with the midi triggered, synthesized sound.

A friend of mine who is into the acoustic recording thing once had a very similar problem with a band. In this case, the mics and room were OK, but the player could not hit consistently enough to get a well balanced drum track. We discussed some electronic/sampling ideas that could help the mix since they couldn't get the drummer in for another take.
He ended up making samples from the drum track, compressing/normalizing those, and then putting them into a VST plug-in called "drumagog".

Drumagog

Its a plug-in that "listens" to your audio drum track and triggers samples according to frequency response, so the snare on the track triggers the snare in the sampelr, etc. You can also mix the two, so that part or none of the original signal is still in the mix. This plug-in does cost some money if I recall correctly, but he was pretty pleased with it (and that is a compliment when an acoustic audiophile appreciates something electronic like that). I finally got to witness it in action myself, and its a pretty slick plug-in for what you are trying to do.

I'm not necessarily recommending this plug-in over the nord...you could achieve the same results from both and I always find it more informative to build your own thing...Also, I don't know if the plug-in can output MIDI instead of the samples you tell it to play...but the plug-in is definetely a worth-while alternative for your issue if the G2 does not work for some reason.

[Unfed]

should be pretty simple for just a kick drum, but if you need to split the frequencies for the whole kit a forum member named Rix came up with a patch here:

http://electro-music.com/forum/topic-6318.html

maybe this could be edited to use for just the kick drum as well?

[davep]

Ages and ages ago, my band had a very elaborate Simmons electronic percussion system triggered off of the real drums. Our system used eight trigger pickups attached to both kicks, the snare, and five toms, with each drum triggering a separate Simmons channel.

As mentioned, the kick is the easiest. If you also want to trigger something from the snare & a couple of other drums it does get tricky. You really need to feed each mic/pickup into a separate input on the synth (fortunately the G2 has four). Mixing the mic signals and then trying to separate the signals and derive clean trigger pulses by filtering is really doing it the hard way.

Even when sending each mic/pickup to a separate synth input you can still have problems. The biggest issue is double triggering (when the drum's sustain is too long and it triggers the synth again causing a flam effect), and preventing adjacent drums from causing false triggers. Here is where treating the signal can help. Use gates, filters, and envelope followers to clean up each mic signal independent of the others. You want to end up with signals that sound like a single quick clean pulse, like the sound of tapping on a microphone. Fine tune it by hitting adjacent drums and making sure these don't cause false triggers.

And an important time saver - do whatever adjustments need to be done to get the acoustic drums to sound right FIRST, and THEN tweak the synth settings to optimize the pulse signals. This is because everything you do to change the sound of the real drum, like tuning it, muffling it, changing the mic placement etc. will require you to re-tweak the settings in the synth.

[Sander_k]

I have a device called the 'Simmons Trixer Mixer' which has 6 ind. audio inputs that convert triggers to midi. First you trim it by giving a soft hit and than the hardest hit. The output trigger can be assigned to any midi-channel + midi-note or its own internal drum-sounds (but they're quite lame)