How to do drum replacement/layering in Studio One without 3rd party plugins

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to see how to make drum replacement in Studio One without using 3rd party plugins!

Drum replacement has always been a very sensitive topic among musicians: some love it, many hates it, but the truth that every mix engineer knows is that they are very important, almost essential to any modern rock, pop or metal production.
In order to do it there are many ways, for example by using drum replacement plugins like Slate Trigger, Aptrigga, Addictive Trigger and so on, but today I would like to focus on a technique that is available (as far as I know) only in Studio One and that makes drum replacement (or anyway turning any rhytmical source into a MIDI) very fast and without using 3rd party plugins, just follow these 5 steps:

1) Choose the track you want to replace (or layer) with samples, for example an acoustic snare or kick track, and from the top toolbar click on the Q icon, this will open a sub-menu in which you need to click on "groove" to open a field that will analyze your track.

2) Drag and drop the desired track in the groove analysis field, it will detect all the peaks in the track and mark them.

3) click on the "Audio Bend" icon on top and it will show you more tools to adjust, from there go on the "threshold" one and adjust it until only (or mostly) the kick hits (if we're replacing a kick track) are detected (because usually with the basic setting it's so sensible that it will mark also for example the snare bleed in the kick microphone).

4) When you are satisfied with the peak detection create a new Instrument Track in Studio One, and load there for example your sampler or virtual drumset, and from the groove analyzer field you can drag and drop directly a MIDI of the detected hits into your new instrument track.

5) The final step is to assign the right sound to the MIDI and clean up the track, eliminating the remaining unwated hits, adjusting the velocity and if necessary by moving the whole MIDI track few milliseconds back, if you hear some slight delay.

Voilà! 

You will have a nice MIDI replica of your acoustic track, that you can use to layer new sounds on top of it or to replace it altogether.

I hope this was helpful!

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