is there a way to filter drums (specifically snares/rimshots) from a sample?

[Cold Truth]

is there a way to do this? i have found a few samples that i want to use, but may not be able to do much with unless i can find a way to filter these out... without messing up the sample itself? i know this is probably a tall order..

so far i have had some success with getting the highs/lows filtered out but these include the drums as well...i am going to try tonight to mess with a few things and see what i can find, so i'll let you all know how it went.. but if anyone knows anything that can point me in the right direction, it could help a lot...

normally sampling one side of the stereo field can take a lot of one element out if they panned things far, but i am having to work with mono outputs to get the samples fornow, so this wont work.....

 

[mercurywaters]

do as much eqing and flitering as you can. then chop out the drums. which will leave spaces in the sample. fill in the spaces with other parts of the sample or other sounds or whatever. thats usually how i deal with it.

 

[God]

To answer your question correctly, answer this:

1) You have snares and rimshots that you want to take out of a sample, right?

2) What is the placement of the snare in the spectrum. You said it's mono, if it wasn't, it would be possible to negate the "middle" of the stereo spectrum, where the snare drum is usually positioned (however, reverb artifacts would still be heard.)

3) Eq'ing will minimise the effect, but will not take out the snare event. Dependant on the sample, it is possible to mask the snare with one of your own, should the programming fall on the same snare as the original sample. Is the original sample's snare in sync with your drum programming?

There are other different ways of approaching it, but you can't fully "take out" a mixed snare from a mono or stereo file, though the closest way is to take it out of a possible stereo field through frequency cancellation. If you can answer these questions I can better assess the matter, and help you.

Sincerely,
God

 

[Mine]

These guys have given you the hard answer... you're not going to get the original sample minus the drums. At a very minimum the transients from the drums are going to bleed into the frequencies that you're looking for..

God is describing a neat classic trick often used for killing vocals (which are most often mixed center) on a sample, it may be useful or not depending on what you have. Google on vocal removing with whatever wave editor you use or you can find some easy winamp plugins that try to do that for karaoke sessions. Absolutely not going to help though if you can't get a stereo transfer of the source.

Your other option is to take the most flexible filter you can get your hands on and tweak tweak tweak till you get something close to useful. Trying to do this with EQ or typical low-high pass filters is going to be an exercise in frustration, you're going to need to be able to select your frequencies precisely to get anything useful.

All that said, it's worth going through the process, if the old drum track aligns with yours at all, you stand a chance of getting some interesting layering out of it. Can help you tune your groove to the sample also if you're finding things too mechanical.