Steven Slate TRIGGER 2.0 is the audio industry’s not so secret weapon for getting big, professional drums sounds in mixes.

I am a writer / composer / engineer / multi-instrumentalist based out of Brooklyn, New York. Some of my credits include Edfringe's Get Got (music and lyrics), the Secret Theater's Antigone (score), a few television pilots (Manahatta, Dropouts, The Minnesotan), and the short story Hills and Valleys (winner of the Henry Roth Award for Excellence in Fiction). My engineering experience ranges from musical theater (Get Got, Voiceless) to indie rock (Empire State Express, Prince Hal, Bulletproof Stockings) to jazz (Learning Curve's Gift). As a guitarist, pianist, bassist, and drummer, I have played alongside pop acts (Josh Groban), respected singer/songwriters (Hawksley Workman), and jazz greats (Sam Rivers). In the early 2000s, I fronted the band Adult Situations. You can follow me on twitter.

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. I’m going to ask you a question about today’s hits. More specifically, today’s drum hits: when it comes to the popular music of our era, how many songs feature real, acoustic drums—of the kind played by humans?

Those of you who buy your music without thinking twice about such things might be inclined to answer, “who cares?” Those of you who buy your music not just to hear it, but to analyze it to death, might say that I’ve missed the point altogether: if the zeitgeist proves anything, it’s that today’s sound is not about the acoustic, but rather, the synthetic, from the trap-inflected stylings of Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse”, to the retro-programming of “Happy”, to the rise of Skrillex and his EDM cohorts over the last five years. However, a small cadre of instrument-oriented rock bands signed to major labels continue to hold onto their acoustic drums for dear life; armed with little more than a snare and sticks, they battle the dark forces of EDM-flecked pop. It’s quite an irony: in an age where synthetic elements in pop music have become the norm, metal-flecked bands like Sevendust (just out with Time Travelers and Bonfires), or hair-centric caterwaulers like Sebastian Bach (likewise with Give ‘Em Hell) are de-facto acoustic acts, because the sound of these acts is nominally generated from instruments played in the moment. It’s guitars plucked with picks, basses plied by fingers, drums beaten by sticks, rather than the present state of affairs: keyboards triggering samples quantized to within an inch of their humanity by producers in the pre-production stages. This has become, in my estimation, the new metric: it’s no longer “acoustic versus electric”—as when Bob Dylan famously plugged into an amplifier at the Newport Folk Festival—it’s “acoustic versus synthetic.” But hold on. Wait a minute. Listen closer to music forged “acoustically” in the digital age—specifically, these “acoustic” drums—and you’ll notice something peculiar: by and large, the major label drum sounds of today are suspiciously perfect.

There is a flawlessness to their sound, a uniformity that, when abused, has the potential to sound sterile. As you listen to the drums of a modern rock song, ask yourself a question about their sonic qualities: do they sound, for lack of a better word, different? Or, perhaps, do they sound the same? Or, paradoxically, do they sound different and the same—different in that they don’t sound like the drums of yesteryear; the same in that there is an undeniably homogenous quality to them? A consistency to each drum hit, a vaulted excellence to its sound that feels somehow uncanny, somewhat unreal? If you have noticed this phenomenon—if you’ve noticed that the drums of today tend to sound shiftily perfect from song to song—you’re not alone. In the industry, it’s called “sample replacement” or “drum replacement,” although many would rather it were called something less drastic, like “sample augmentation,” or “drum enhancement.” You’ve seen me mention it.

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Yet I’ve never gone into what drum replacement is, how it works, and how to recognize it. What is drum replacement?

The challenges of recording an acoustic drum-set are. One of the biggest obstacles has to do with an intrinsic aspect of the drums themselves: they are not one instrument, but many (including kick, snare, toms, cymbals, hi-hat, and often more), with sound-waves bouncing off their surfaces in a panoply of directions at once.

This makes the act of constructing a coherent sonic picture of the drums inherently demanding. The late, great Roger Nichols, a pioneer of modern day sample replacement But sample replacement as we know it today was “.” The most famous example of this can be heard below: For this song, Roger Nichols programmed the majority of the tune with pre-recorded drum hits, Of course, other progenitors exist: Hip hop was born in, and certainly, the ethos of hip-hop sampling has contributed to the methodologies of sample replacement; likewise, —another early sampling method—peppers the liner notes of the Alan Parsons Project 1980s back-catalogue.