Drum replacement (hitpoints to MIDI) problem

Cubase
1

Hello all.

I have a multitrack recording of my band playing live in which, due to setting up in a screaming hurry, the kick drum mic level was set far too high, and comes out hugely distorted and clipped. As it’s an otherwise excellent performance, I tried to convert the kick drum hitpoints to MIDI notes with the aim of replacing them, but the clipping is so extreme that even with hitpoint threshold set to maximum, no hitpoints are being generated.

I then had the idea of gating the track, exporting it to a new audio file and trying hitpoint detection again. After a bit of fiddling I had some success with this, but it still needs a lot of editing.

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions of any further processing that could be done on the original track apart from the gating which would produce a more defined “click” on each hit so that I could get the hitpoints more accurate.

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

2

Hi

I always use this plugin:

http://koen.smartelectronix.com/KTDrumTrigger/

It’s free, easy enough to set up and works well; you can just set up a sampler such as shortcircuit with a well-recorded kick drum and you should be good to go. Saved several of my students in the past…

I know your audio file isn’t perfect, but I would think you should be able to get something usable out of this, and once it’s generated the MIDI you can always tweak to suit any mistriggering, etc.