Drum Sample Replacement And or Augmentation In Logic Pro With VoiceOver

One of the reasons I am a big advocate for using Logic Pro’s Drum tools is accessibility, and when it comes to Drum sample replacement or augmentation there is more than meets the eye if you are accustomed to only browsing patches in the library. That being said though, these tips and tricks that we’ll cover in this tutorial also allows 3rd party drum instruments to get in on the action and assist us as Blind producers in taking our drum tracks to the next level. In addition this tutorial covers how to work around issues when dragging and dropping tracks in Logic, which is one way to organize tracks and get the drum sample tracks into the same track stacks as your multi out drums.
Drum Augmentation or Sample Augmentation is when you blend in another kick or snare etc sample with the one originally included in the drum kit  to get you closer to the sound you are looking for. Drum Replacement is when you do this but mute or remove the original kick, snare or etc sample and only use the newly added one.
If you haven’t yet, check out the tutorial where I use Drummer to build a drum track for a song. At the end of that tutorial I talk about how you can customize the drum sounds by tuning and damping them, and how to convert it to a multi out version of the kit so you can EQ, Compress and otherwise process the individual drums. This tutorial picks up where that one leaves off and talks about how you can use Logic Pro’s own drum samples or third party drum kits to enhance your drums.
Any questions on this, leave them in the comments.

Check out the tutorial here

First up, we’ll discuss using the Logic Pro Sampler. There are some additional drum kits and drum samples located in the sampler that may be overlooked if just browsing the library. Best of all, there are some layered samples as well which can serve as a good starting point for sample augmentation.
Also covered is how to use either the  techniques covered here or key limit it so that the sampler only triggers the kick piece that you want, whether that is just a kick or snare etc.
Alternatively, after creating the new software instrument track, instantiating the Logic Sampler on it or a 3rd party drum instrument, and key limiting the track to only pay attention to the MIDI note you want to use, you can then drag that track into the track stack with your multi out drums. This is useful if you are using one of Logic Pro’s Producer Kit’s and saves you having to copy the regions to the track with the software instrument. This also means when you solo, mute or put any bus processing on the drums track stack, it will also affect the samples that were added in.

Key Commands for Drag and Drop

• Mark track to be dragged – VO Comma
• Drop Marked track on the current track – VO Period
• Drop marked track above the current track – VO Shift Comma
• Drop marked track below the current track – VO Shift Period

Also you can select a track with VO Command Return..
Once we have the track in the track stack, I show how you can switch from sampler to a third party drum instrument. Because the key limit is in place it still only triggers the kick. If you want to use multiple kick, snare etc samples, you can duplicate the track and use a different drum instrument or Drum sample from the sampler on each track.
Likewise, you can switch the sample in the sampler to a snare or switch to a different instrument for a snare. In this case I Switch to liquid Death Snare for the snare drum. I also change the key limit from C1 to E1 which is the MIDI note triggering the snare in this scenario. However in the case of Liquid Death Snare, E1 triggers the flem, so I use the MIDI transposer effect plug in to transpose it up half step to F1, as that’s the MIDI note Liquid Death Snare uses to trigger the snare.
In a scenario where the third party library uses D1 for the snare, you could likewise use the MIDI transposer effect to transpose the E1 down a whole step to D1.
In addition to switching the instrument on the track, you can also select the track and choose a drum patch from the library. This can be interesting because whether you choose an acoustic or electronic kick, you can tune it to match the kit pieces you are blending it with as I show in the Liquid Death Snare tutorial. Stay tuned for that in Part 2.