Simulating Microphone Bleed and Tom-tom Resonance in Multisampled Drum Workstations
In recent years multisampled drum workstations have become increasingly popular. They offer an alternative to recording a full drum kit if a producer, engineer or amateur lacks the equipment, money, space or knowledge to produce a quality recording. These drum workstations strive for realism, often recording up to a hundred different velocity hits of the same drum, including recordings from all microphones for each drum hit and including bleed between these microphones. This paper describes research undertaken to investigate if it is possible to simulate the snare and kick drum bleed into the tom-tom microphones and the subsequent resonance of the tom-tom that is caused, with the aim of reducing the amount of audio data that needs to be stored. A listening test was performed asking participants to identify the real recording from a simulation. The results were not statistically significant to reject the hypothesis that subjects were unable to distinguish the difference between the real and simulated recordings. This suggests listeners were unable to identify the real recording in the majority of cases.