What's everyone using to do drum replacement. I don't presently have any way of doing it and would like to be able to.

If you have SONAR, you have everything you need to pull off drum replacement. Tools such as Drumagog are very cool and amazing, but most of the time AudioSnap and any drum synth will do as long as the drums are multi-tracked. Even if all you have is a stereo mix of the drums, you can usually still extract just the kick or just the snare.


Once you have a MIDI track that represents the drum hits, you can route it to any synth or sample player. Session Drummer works fine, and you can even do a lot with the TTS-1. I like to double acoustic drums with various pieces from the TTS-1, in particular the kick.


If you have Kontakt, you have a great many options, including being able to buy individual drum samples for cheap (like 5 bucks each) or download free drum kits (like the excellent Big Mono from Analogue Drums). But even if you don't have Kontakt, these samples are generic wave files that can be played by any sample player, including SONAR's bundled Cyclone.

2-cents: A snare replacement may be easier to fit in and less noticeable if you use a few samples of the actual snare from the track. Just having a nice sounding solid hit OF ITSELF to lay over it can work wonders. Often you can still use the original snare track right along with it, but at a reduced volume, thus avoiding the possible unnatural side effects of gating the snare track. ALSO: Don't be afraid to build the drum mix WITHOUT even using some of the tracks, or by seeing what surprises might happen - I can think of a few times when I found it sounded best to let the HI HAT or HI TOM track provide the majority of the snare sound. This can and will happen from time to time.