Ever heard a song and liked the drum track in it? Ever wanted to use that beat in your own tracks but without outright copying it? You can convert it to MIDI and insert it with your own drums. Here’s how…
You’ll definitely need some plugins for your DAW to accomplish this. Some plugins that come with DAWs can do it on their own. I’m going to tell you what I’ve used, but keep in mind you can replicate this on your own and maybe with what you already have.
First, find a song or track where you like the beat and want to incorporate it into your own. I used Remi Wolf’s “Disco Man.” I really like the drum track in it for its elegant simplicity and nice hard hits. It’s an excellent track.
I grabbed a short sample of it using the Sample plugin for my browser. I pulled it into my DAW as an audio track (track 1) so I could play it to grab the beat.
I also dropped it into Serato Sample. In Serato Sample I can easily see the tempo, and I set my DAW’s project tempo to that same tempo (85 bpm in this case).
Next I used my drum replacement plugin, XLN Audio’s Addictive Trigger. I then played the sample into it from my DAW track 1. I set Addictive Trigger to Kick and captured that first. Then I set it to Snare and captured that. After each capture, I dragged the MIDI to an instrument (in my case, Addictive Drums).
I had to fine-tune Addictive Trigger to capture the drum hits. The snare was a bit difficult, but I got it. So there’s a lot of back and forth on this step, and after each iteration, I dragged the MIDI to my drum kit (Addictive Drums).
Then, I combined the MIDI of the kick and snare into one file by copying and pasting them together into one instance of Addictive Drums. Here below is what the MIDI looked like in the Addictive Drums track. You can see I have the sample as Track 1 and now the Pattern 1 (my new drum track) is in the Track 2 slot.
I adjusted my drums to something that sounded very similar to the original Remi Wolf track. This took a few tries but I quickly got something that sounded close and I went with it.
Then I played my drums alongside the original sample, and they matched perfectly.
So now I have MIDI of the drums that I can use anywhere and with a beat that can not only replicate what the Remi Wolf song has, but I can swap out other drum kits for it and get whole new beats out of it.
And I can use it with a bit of modification for a new track: