Drum sound replacing help.

[antenna]

While our drummer is away recuperating, I set myself a task to learn protools editing by mapping to, and re-creating an entire track to a performance taped on a cassette during rehearsal! I only have an MBox, but since we're not recording more than 1 instrument at a time -no problem.

I figured I would also learn more about drum editing for the future if I can match his (great) performance beat for beat,

OK, I built a tempo map that changes beat by beat if necessary, it took half a day to map using tab to transient, and the snare, bass drum and hi hat samples all snap to the grid and sit well with the drums except.....

There are a few breaks I cannot make sound 'real' -
One is a bar of triplets on the snare, so 12 hits, that always sounds like a machine gun, even if I mix up 3 or 4 separate samples and I've snapped to every one of his hits,

- Any tips or tricks?

Another is how to duplicate samples through the song. Because the tempo is constantly variable, each (for instance) hi-hat sample needs to be of a different duration. The samples I have were recorded at 110bpm whereas the track I have is 145bpm so time shrinking makes them sound fake. I tend to trim a 'master' sample to be an 1/8 note long, then place these across the song, then go back and re-trim each one to expand to snap to the next one along so they are 1/4 notes (but different durations) etc. I end up with hundreds of samples in the directory.

Is this the way it should be done? Or is there a faster/neater way?

Thanks in advance.

[Cramulh]

For your bar of triplets, you should remember that drummers are not machines and try to nudge slightly each note. You should also vary the levels of the hits, for example the first hit is often louder, like all the notes played with the right hand (if your drummer is right handed)
Hope it will help you !