Plugin Review: Slate Trigger 2

I've recently finished recording drums for my major project (the 3 song nautical mile release). It sounds great; recording live drums is a much more satisfying experience than simply using samples, plus live cymbals always sound better. It's quite hard to recreate real cymbal sounds using a drum machine. After spending some time mixing however, I found there were certain parts of my drum recording that were lacking in punchiness or fatness. The kick and snare sounded nice, but just didn't seem to be consistent enough for the super-tight style of music I'm trying to produce. This is where I decided it would be a good idea to incorporate some use of sampling into my drum tracks. Using Steven Slate Trigger 2, I was able to add a sampled kick, snare, and toms to my drum recording.

Trigger 2 is an automatic drum replacement (or in my case, enhancement) tool that reads the waveforms of your drum tracks and uses the peaks to trigger a pre-loaded sample. It works in the same way as a gate or expander would. You are able to set a threshold (in Trigger 2 the parameter is labelled 'sensitivity') and when the volume of your track exceeds the threshold, it triggers the sample. It actually allows you to see the peaks of the waveform that have triggered the sample, so you can judge by looking whether the sensitivity has been set correctly. There are heaps of different parameters that you can change to fine tune the sound of your samples. For example, Trigger 2 has the option of layered up to 8 different samples at one time. You can layer direct microphone samples, or room sounds to add reverb and ambience to your track. It has a built in mixer, so you can adjust the volume of each sample, tune them up or down, pan left and right or even phase flip them. There are heaps of customisation options.

If you switch over to the 'view curves' menu, you can customise the dynamic range in which the samples are played. Because the samples are triggered by your original drum track, they are sensitive to the velocity of the original drums. If you want to keep a lot of the 'live' feel with a more dynamic velocity range, you can set the DYN knob to 100 and keep the default velocity range of 0 to 127. For a more consistent or compressed sound, you can reduce the DYN knob and change the velocity range. Theres also a VEL (velocity) knob to increase or decrease the average velocity of the samples. To customise the sound even more, you can change the attack, sustain and release times for each sample. Set the fastest attack possible for a super punchy kick, or slow down the release on a snare to let it ring out longer.

Slate Trigger is most often used for sample REPLACEMENT, where in most cases you would insert the plugin as an insert on your drum track. This gets rid of the original drum hits completely, unless they are not loud enough to pass the threshold. The parts of the track that don't meet the threshold will still be present, in which case you can use the built in gate to filter out unwanted spill. In my case, I used Trigger 2 to add samples onto a new track while keeping my original kick and snare, and blending them together. To do this, it's simply a case of sending the drum track to a new auxiliary and inserting the Trigger 2 plugin onto that. You could also just insert it onto the original track and adjust the mix control, but that's the same argument that someone could make for reverbs and delays.

Slate Trigger 2 has significantly benefited my drum tracks by adding heaps more punch and consistency to my kick and snare, and much more clarity to my toms. The option of either laying the samples over your original drums or replacing them completely is awesome, and playing with the dynamic controls can keep your drums sounding pretty real. I find that the combination of real cymbals and overheads combined with layered kick and snare, and replaced toms sounds really tight. Alternatively, for something like a metal drum recording, you could completely replace the kick, snare and toms, and decrease the dynamic range to make everything really tight and punchy. I would recommend Slate Trigger 2 to anyone that is seeking a way to beef up their drum recordings or save them from badly recorded kick, snare or toms tracks. It's also really great to have the option of carefully choosing a drum sound after recording, but before processing.

Here's a sound example of a drum track with and without Trigger 2: