Trigger drums from audio track?

Cubase
1

Hi!

I have an audio track of drums - kick, specifically - that I’d like to replace with a better sample. This is on an audio track in Cubase 9.

I have the VST plugin BFD Drums on an instrument track in in this project.

I’d like to be able to route the output of the audio track to the input of the BFD drum instrument track so that the audio track of the kick drum will trigger the sample of the kick drum in BFD.

So far…no luck getting the routing to work.

Is this possible and has anyone done this? Any tips/directions would be very helpful!

Thanks!

-Rowen

2

Interesting question that I don’t think can be done. But, it would be cool to know for sure so I figured I’d bump this topic.

Regards :sunglasses:

3

I don’t think you can just ‘trigger’ a BFD sound from an audio file and replace the original like this? I do know it’s possible with Melodyne to replace a sound with another but that’s purely from audio to audio of course.

4

For “realtime” trigger you might want to use something like this:

There used to be other trigger plugins as well, but maybe most of them are probably 32 bit…

If you don’t need the “realtime” aspect, the export hitpoints as midi track command in the audio editor (not at the DAW at the moment, but it is named something like this) has a quite reliable output…

5

Open kick drum track in Sample editor. Create hitpoints. Create MIDI Notes. Change the pitch of the MIDI notes to match the bass drum you want to trigger.

1 Like
6

In 9 Pro you can:
select audio clip
open editor, variaudio tab
reset, reanalyze audio
convert to midi: click on little triangle, extract midi
choose pitch mode or just notes, choose velocity
now have midi track; drag midi clip to new instrument track

-Tom

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7

Thanks Tom. I was searching for a solution like that.

8

well, converting drumtracks to MIDI for blending or replacing with samples is some kind of an industry standard and there are many ways to do that.

I used Drumagog since day one for that
Since a couple of years Drumagog seems to be dead and I am using Slate Trigger anyway
you can create hitpoints and convert them to midi like described above
there are a couple or other solutions out there which can do the trick more or less good, Addictive Drums or SPL Drumxchanger etc…

All of these methods need quite some manual editing. Hitpoints are not very precise usually, maybe on a for on the floor scenario… but with fast drumming, fast doublebass, fast and sloppy played tomfills, snarerolls etc you will spend quite a while carefully editing the MIdi tracks… Slate Trigger gives IMHO the best results, Hitpoints are not sample precise enough for me when it comes to phase consistent blending… It takes usually about a day to convert all drumtracks of an album to midi… kick, snare, toms… Kick is usually done quite fast, toms are nasty so I usually do not create midi here - because I like a natural sounding mix anyway - but this is not point of discussion.

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