Sonic Reality was in the studio with Ken Scott and Bob Seibenberg, the drummer from Supertramp, recreating THAT sound! It is fascinating watching Ken do it. We put up the Supertramp tracks and then matched it up to the recorded tracks using the same gear! Ken got a U67 on each tom (hard to find, we had to rent them from Ocean Way Studios), a KM56 on the snare (interesting! I m always using a 57 for that but the KM is obviously crispier) and Coles 4038 ribbon mics for overheads which I’ve never used that way but they sound great! The character of the drums are authentic here and we A/B it with the original and it sounds like we are going back in time recording Crime of the Century… but for a NEW century. Well, it IS 96k and going to be chopped up into loops, slices, multi-channel drum kits you can play, Rexes, Apple Loops and all the rest… eventually making its way into your favorite sampler formats one way or another.

What we do is try to capture the sound and feel of the drummer in these sessions. We use a familiar song as a starting point but then go OFF from there with variations of the snare, kick, hats, ride, tom fills which are unrelated to any particular song but would be useful for someone’s new music they are making with the library. You can write a completely new style tune of your own but use THIS particular 70′s analog sound to do it. There’s material in there that could be used for a lot of styles. There are a couple of rap songs out there using Supertramp hooks (“don’t you look at my girlfriend”) and there were quite a few new grooves we did that I could picture some rap producer making a hit out of. Some good loose funk in there too. GREAT rock and classic rock grooves galore of course. It’s like you had Bob come play on YOUR album since there’s so much variety PLUS you ALSO have the playable kit which is worth the purchase alone! I can’t wait to play this kit and extra snares, percussion and various noises from the keyboard in our I-Map!

One other thing that is very cool about this is that we’re sampling to 2 inch analog tape and using a Trident A Range like the one that Ken used at Trident Studios in England. We’re video documenting it so you ll get to see some of this on www.studioprofiles.com. I am going to start posting behind the scenes videos like mad of this and also other Studio ProFiles sessions and even a little mini documentary on Genesis at some point with footage I have of Nick Davis mixing Mama in 5.1 and the guys rehearsing for the tour (which you can already see a little bit of at www.youtube.com/sonicreality )

Co-producing this with Ken Scott is an incredible honor for me and Sonic Reality. We’re thrilled about it! It’s been both a learning experience and we’re proud of being a part of his history. We had Ross Garfield, the Drum Doctor, helping us as well on top of several audio experts. One of these days we’ll have a live camera streaming on the web for one of these sessions so you can really be a fly on the wall if you wanted to. There were some stories I know I can’t tell but there are plenty of great ones that we can and will. Brian Kehew who wrote www.recordingthebeatles.com has been instrumental in putting this together. You should check out that book by the way. It’s fantastic. The most detailed info about any band recording that I’ve seen.

That’s it for now. This week Ken and I are recording Bill Cobham! Another challenging session recreating sounds of the 70′s with one of the most influential drummers of all time. See  you again soon! – Dave Kerzner (aka Squids).

Setting out to capture the authentic sound of different styles of music as well as the sound of specific drummers, in many cases Sonic Reality even collaborated with the original legendary studio drummers. To get classic drum sounds in the style of Peter Gabriel they recorded Jerry Marotta who played on 5 Peter Gabriel albums. To get an authentic jazz drum sound with a massive variety of cymbals they recorded Danny Gottlieb from the original Pat Metheny Group. For modern pop/R&B John Blackwell laid down phat beats that he’s played with Prince, Diddy and Justin Timberlake. For progressive rock drums Nick D’Virgilio from Spock’s Beard, Genesis, and Tears for Fears played a variety of kits from his signature Mapex kit to classic Gretsch and Premier kits in the style of Phil Collins with the help of Ross Garfield, the Drum Doctor. For drum sounds in the style of Steely Dan both Steve Gadd and Ed Greene are in the Studio ProFiles series and to get the signature sound in the style of Ringo or Bonham engineer Mark Hornsby recorded at Java Jive studios in Nashville with the real deal vintage Ludwig drum kits and mics to the spec of what was used at that time.

For the Motown and Vintage Soul sound they used a vintage Gretsch kit with the same miking techniques used on classic R&B, Soul, and Funk records on Motown, Staxx, and Atlantic records. They also captured extra modern alternative mic options for the best of both worlds.

Dave Kerzner on Vintage vs. Modern Recording Techniques: “Each drum kit is miked up to have a direct mics on every drum, a variety of ambient mics as well as a bottom “snare rattle” mic and often a Yamaha sub kick as an extra discrete option to play with in the final product. Even though something like a sub kick wasn’t used on say a classic James Brown record, a drum groove done in his style has the option in this series of being processed to sound just like the original recording or alternatively with the addition of a sub kick channel and stereo ambient mics it can be made to sound “larger than life”. Perhaps, for a hip hop production that extra deep bass might suit the funky groove with that vintage flavor and character that makes a track sound distinct and impressive.”

OFF THE RECORD – To Sample or Not To Sample

There are so many cases where artists, especially those working in various pop/urban/electronic styles of modern music, are trying to sample beats right off the record! But, we all know now that you can’t do that without obtaining the rights from the record label or the owner of that recording. So, that’s why these replica kits and grooves from classic rock and soul recordings are so liberating to have because once you simply buy the sound collections you obtain the legal right to use that groove in your music royalty free! You have piece of mind because you can use it freely in your music which you wouldn’t get if you had lifted the sound from someone’s record. You can also take Studio ProFiles’ raw multi-track material and produce your music as if you had access to the original master tapes of your favorite songs. That’s why the Studio ProFiles slogan is “Access To The Masters”. It’s really a double entendre because it also refers to the access you get to the master players as well.

The way Studio ProFiles are meant to be used.

The focus is on the main authentic signature grooves because the additional playable drum kit samples can be used to add an infinite amount of customization of lead ins, fills and breaks. This way the collections could offer more variety of grooves as opposed to only predetermined song part grooves where everyone could risk sounding the same. With this you are still very much a part of the creative process. It’s almost like having a drummer in the studio who starts off playing a groove and then you as the producer say to him “I like that beat but if you’d play a tom fill here and then the crash there that would be great”. You can just add in those specific parts you want yourself and without any argument from the drummer!

Mark Hornsby on Studio ProFiles Tempo Choices: “Sometimes the grooves were recorded at different tempos but generally they were recorded just in the main comfortable tempo that the drummer was playing. This way, the ideal feel of the groove is captured and since Sonic Reality developed a proprietary technique for creating the first ever time-aligned multi-track Rex 2 files, the grooves can later be played in different tempos by the end user of the product.”

The “Infinite Player” can read Sonic Reality’s proprietary multi-track Rex 2 files and has them conveniently mapped across the keyboard and layered with the same individual output assignments as the associated drum kit from that session so you can bounce them both to audio tracks in your song. In the end it can look like you were doing a multi-track drum session in the first place but without the need of a studio, the gear, the musicians, the engineer or the lengthy time and high cost to record a great sounding drum track. What a wonderful virtual world! You can make seamless transitions between the kit and grooves customizing your drum parts to suit your song in every way you’d want.

The Vertical Velocity vs. Horizontal Positional Method

As opposed to taking up space doing hundreds of velocities of one position of the drum where the sound’s only changes are from vertical velocities, Sonic Reality thought it was more important to cover different areas of each drum spread out horizontally across the keyboard such as a center hit, off center second stick hit, edge hit in two spots and various rim with a reasonable amount of velocity layers to achieve the same timbral variation of the original drum while the velocity to amp takes care of the dynamic changes in volume. With different positions of the kit spread across the keyboard it is more of the range of tones a drummer would have available when playing a real set.

The Secrets Behind Sonic Reality’s Multi-Track Rex Grooves

The task of editing the Studio ProFiles collections was even more daunting than the sample sessions. To do the editing and programming it can take many months or even years as it has with the Studio ProFiles series. This is because not only does each individual hit have to be marked, trimmed, separated, named and organized out of thousands but also each transient of every groove has to be meticulously “sliced” using three different programs, one of which is an application Sonic Reality had created specifically to be able to author time-aligned multi-track Rex files which was previously not possible. “Time-aligned” means that the time relationship between the direct mic sound and the ambient mics are kept intact even if the tempo is changed. There s actually a natural delay between the sound coming from each of the mics depending on how far away it is from the drum. Typically, for every foot away the mic is from the drum there is 1ms of latency. So, a room mic that is 10 feet away from the snare would potentially have a 10ms delay compared to the sound of the snare direct mic that is only a few inches from the snare head. When you record a live drummer these mics all work together to give you the depth perception of a drum kit played in a nice sounding room. It is crucial that when you make a Rex file, Apple Loop or Acidized Wave file that has slice points on the transients that compress or expand in time to sync to your host tempo that the time between the directs, your overheads and room does not change! They have to move together in sync. If they didn’t the depth perception could be all out of wack among other issues.

The way Sonic Reality solves this is by always having the transient slice point on the closest mic to the drum which is usually the directs, although for cymbals it would be the overheads. Even on the loop for the room mic the slice point is on the same place in time as the separate loop for the direct mic. In fact, like a grid, the slice points for a groove all MATCH between every discrete mic s loop so that when it is layered in your DAW on multiple tracks or inside the included Infinite Kontakt Player plug-in it doesn t matter if you speed it up or slow it down, the time relationship between the direct mics, the overheads and the room will always remain the same. This offers the elastic tempo capability of Rex format but with discrete mic channels to process through compressors, eqs, gates, reverbs and everything else you d use if you were recording/mixing a live multi-track drum session. That’s something new in this series that we’ve not seen before.

The Playable Kit vs. the Audio Grooves

So, one may ask if you have expressive playable kits then why do you even need the audio grooves? While you can do amazing things with a more expressive mapped kit like the I-Map there is still and always will be something about a great drummer’s playing that can only be heard from a recording of them actually playing it. There are so many places the drummer can hit on every kit piece with any part of the stick, with their own particular timing and feel not to mention each time they hit something a different part of the kit resonates and the room responds differently.
The goal of the Studio ProFiles series is to offer the authentic sound and feel of a real drummer playing but the flexibility to be able to play the parts that suit your song as opposed to having to be a slave to whatever the loop material offers. By using both the loops AND the drum kit both with the same discrete mic mixing you can finally be able to make a drum track that fools the ear into thinking you had a real live drummer playing on your songs… and not just any drummer but a world famous musician Jerry Marotta, Danny Gottlieb or Steve Gadd.

How the Infinite Player and Studio ProFiles differ from other plug-ins.

The Studio ProFiles “Infinite Player” plug-in differs in its approach to creating a drum track than every other popular drum plug-in currently on the market. Most other drum plug-ins are either just playable drum kits accompanied by midi files such as BFD and EZ Drummer which have dedicated interfaces for discrete mic mixing but do not deal with audio loops at all. Then you have popular products like Stylus RMX which use Rex-style audio grooves but it offers no way to play the full velocity mapped drum kit used in the groove. The closest drum software that incorporates the concept of offering both the playable kits, midi grooves and the original audio grooves is Submersible’s DrumCore software but it is stereo only and does not offer the discrete multi-mic mixing capability. While Sonic Reality as a sound company supports BFD2, Stylus RMX and DrumCore with sound packs that will be sold on the new download site http://www.downloadablesoundz.com to get the only flexible tempo multi-track audio loops combined with playable multi-track drum kits and midi grooves, the Studio ProFiles series and Infinite Player is currently the only way to get those features in a plug-in.