Episode 629 – Erasing Leakage But Keeping The Drummer’s Performance DNA With Dr. Bill Evans

On this week’s episode, I speak with Dr. Bill Evans, audio scientist, producer, educator, and inventor of the Performance Restoration methodology.

Bill believes that drum recording has always involved a painful tradeoff, but it doesn’t have to.

Most engineers accept mic bleed as an unavoidable character of a drum sound, questioning whether removing it could actually alter the drummer’s true performance DNA.

Bill spent seven years answering exactly that question. His concept of the Virtual Audio Workstation, involves a new audio file format that remains compatible with WAV files while carrying additional performance metadata.

The format separates articulations, preserves room information as an independent element, and provides what Bill describes as functionally infinite dynamic range, allowing details like hi-hat foot checks to be raised dramatically without introducing grain or artifact.

At the center of that work is PRISM, Bill’s AI framework that converts audio to MIDI, edits it, and converts it back again, using the artist’s own recordings as the sole training data rather than a generative pool.

The distinction is important. Generative AI aims for plausible. PRISM aims for what a specific musician would actually play.

One of the earliest demonstrations came during a Flying Colors session when seven seconds of guitarist Steve Morse’s solo disappeared. Evans reconstructed the missing passage through PRISM, and Morse, known for being exacting about his performances, could not identify the recreated section.

The larger takeaway is a fundamental rethinking of how engineers approach drum recording.

By separating articulations and ambience into controllable elements, PRISM preserves ghost notes, cymbal strike positions, and subtle performance details that are typically lost in the production process, allowing the final recording to reflect the musician’s actual performance rather than a substitute version of it.

You can hear more at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Mixcloud, Spotify, Deezer, TuneIn Radio, or RadioPublic.

Also, a video version of this podcast is now available on YouTube as well.

Enjoy the show!

Chapters:

00:00:00 – Coming up…

00:01:16 – What is Prism and the idea behind it?

00:02:13 – The virtual audio workstation, the next evolution of the DAW

00:03:37 – How converting audio to MIDI preserved a drummer’s performance

00:05:16 – Recreating Steve Morse’s lost guitar solo with Prism

00:08:55 – Should you remove all bleed from a live recording?

00:10:03 – Why drums are the one instrument we still cannot truly record

00:12:47 – Ghost notes, hi hat checks, and the drummer performances nobody hears

00:15:27 – Can Prism restore and repair older recordings?

00:16:29 – How Bill Evans went from fan to studio engineer to audio scientist

00:20:52 – The new audio file format inside Prism

00:23:19 – How Prism interfaces with a DAW through its plugin suite

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