John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

I have a small one room studio. I have to record drums in the same room that i do the actual tracking. I do not want to spend money on a drum iso booth right now becuase i will be leaving this spot in a short amount of time. What do you think of using drum triggers on acoustic drums, and putting drum practice pads on the drum heads to kill most of the noise?

Has anyone tried this before? If so, any good luck?

Thanks
Jason

That will lessen the noise for sure; but very few drummers have anything good to say for sampled drum sounds. Personally, I'd rather use them than not make music; but I'd really rather have it ALL Steve

If you are just messing around laying down ideas it works fine. But if you are looking for a commeral sound then you will play hell getting it out of a trigger sound. It does depend on what kind of music you are recording also.

Glenn

I disagree - many commercial sounds today are samples, even live drums with samples, especially kick an snare, as well.

Drum machines and samples work very well if programmed by someone who understands drums and recording.

cheers
john

well that is why I put the

"It does depend on what kind of music you are recording also"



Glenn

Last couple of industrial videos I sold, the sound track music was entirely keyboard workstation including the drums (nothing else set up, no choice) and they LOVED it - original music, no extra royalty fees, fit the situation, paid $3500 for a 15 minute video - I'm sure not complaining...

John Sayers wrote:I disagree - many commercial sounds today are samples, even live drums with samples, especially kick an snare, as well.

Drum machines and samples work very well if programmed by someone who understands drums and recording.

cheers
john

Ditto.

You have to find the right sounds. I have the Yamaha Motif ES6
.It has a few sets of nice drum kits onboard. There

here ya go.. pretty example.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbReYWXSyjA

I'm a drummer (and a rather picky one at that), so I'll chime in here as well.

As far as sampled drums there are some multisampled kits that can sound pretty slamming (and extremely convincing at sounding like a well recorded, high quality acoustic kit). The first ones that come to mind are FXpansion's BFD kits and Toontracks "Drum Kit From Hell" kits. Google should find those for you. Both are superb. Listen to the demos for these kits and you will swear you are listening to real kit being played by a drummer in a great sounding room, etc. Even the cymbals sound great. That's a high compliment from me.

But you really need a computer and a good low latency sound card, plus a good midi drum interface, etc., to be able to comfortably play these kits with acoustic drum triggers, etc., without having enough latency to be bothersome to a good drummer while playing in the drum parts.

There are also quite a few options for DIY drum pads. I have some RealFeel practice pads (basically natural gum rubber glued to an octagonal piece of MDF), and I've used the in expensive pintech acoustic drum triggers on these with some good success, and I've also used those pintech acoustic drum triggers on acoustic drums fitted with mesh heads to some some success as well. If you google something like DIY drum triggers or something similar, you should come across a number of good sites. There's one whole website/forum on building DIY drum triggers that has some EXCELLENT stuff. I don't remember the name of it or have a link handy at the mo, but if you do a bit of googling, you are likely to run across it, and when you do you'll know exactly what I mean.

This will get you there with some fiddling, but it will take a fair bit of effort to get something as playable as something like, for example, the Roland V-Drums kits (even the most basic of which would cost you as much to buy as it would cost you to build a portable drum booth!).

I've actually been meaning to build some DIY trigger pads to set on my drums for some time now. I have the 1/4-inch natural gum rubber, the wood and some piezo triggers, etc., and I was going to just make round pads that are the size of each of my drums, and just set them on the drums to play them. I just haven't actually had the time to do it yet.

Hope that helps.

Scott

Thanks Scott; I've played the Roland V-drums and like the way they play, but most of Roland's sounds are too processed for me, sometimes to the point of not wanting to "sit" in a mix even tho they sound really good alone...

BTW, can you do me a favor and edit your profile to include a location? It's one of the requests in the infamous "don't even think about..." thread; thanks... Steve

Re location in profile . . . will do, Steve.

knightfly wrote:Thanks Scott; I've played the Roland V-drums and like the way they play, but most of Roland's sounds are too processed for me, sometimes to the point of not wanting to "sit" in a mix even tho they sound really good alone...

Yep, I have to agree. I can pretty much pick them out every time when I hear them in a mix. I think if I were to be in a position in which I had to use Roland V Drums exclusively in the studio, I would probably use them solely for playing in the MIDI track, and then replace them with the DKFH or BFD drums. Either that, or I would just use the V-drums for pads/interface to play the DKFH or BFD drums live -- as long as your pooter has the juice to do so, with not too much other CPU and/or hard drive intensive stuff going on at the same time, and you can get good, playably low latency (which is certainly possible to do).

If you want to play the DKFH or BFD kits live/real time, it's a pretty good idea to have as much RAM as you can stuff in your pooter, and also to try to run the streaming samples off a separate HD if you can. Most modern hard drives should be fast enough to do it, even with quite a few audio tracks running, but streaming the samples from their own separate hard drive is likely to get you higher, more trouble-free performance and lower latency without running into glitching.

I know there are quite a few people who do trigger DKFH and BFD live/in real time using various MIDI drum controller setups, etc. I haven't done this myself, though (although I certainly have triggered other multi-sampled kits with my KAT midiKITI PRO into my computer/soft-sampler, If I'm not mistaken, though, I'm not sure there are any hardware samplers that would have the storage space and/or juice to deal with such a large multisampled intrument.

If there is, I'd be interested in knowing more about it -- I like to be aware of what is out there.

I do like to have the option to use high quality multi-sampled kits, as well as other types of sampled kits, but 99% of what I do at this point is with real drums, and I'm fortunate that I have a good room for recording them in my home studio.

Steve . . . out of curiosity, have you done anything in the studio with the SPD-20? I've played around with these a bit as well (just demoing -- no actual serious work), and I thought they were a gas to play, mainly because of the included soundset. Have you found the same to be the case with the sounds of the SPD-20, with regard to having a difficult time getting them to sit in the mix?

I am new to midi, so i have some questions. If i did go the midi route with diy triggers on the drums, and mic the cymbals, how do i get the midi info to my computer for the sound? I want to use a seperate computer as the "drum computer". I would like to get the DKFH and use those sounds, and send the drums to my Tascam SX-1 for editing/mixing. I would like to have each trigger on its own channel, but if that is not possible, that is okay. There is a built in midi sequencer on the SX, but like i said before, i have no idea on how midi works or what it is for.

I imagine that i would need a drum brain (mabey not?) for the triggers, and take the midi out of that and go to either the SX or the "drum PC" for the sounds. This is confusing, but it is what i would like to have.

Could i take the sounds from the DKFH and put them on the SX somehow and use the MIDI sequencer inside of that, or would it be too much latency?

Let me know


Thanks
Jason

nukmusic wrote:here ya go.. pretty example.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbReYWXSyjA

anyone look at the video?

Mutha-freakin' bear, I might ALMOST be able to keep up with that with sticks and pads or acoustic drums; no WAY I could do it on those cheesy little buttons. Amazing... Steve

Scott, haven't messed with the SPD-20 at all. Right now my studio is more of a storage room, I'm using a spare bedroom to edit video and write workstation-type sound tracks for industrial video stuff, so I'm mixing in the 'puter (Samplitude) editing on same (Magix Movie Edit Pro) then burning DVD's and copying them to VHS for dual media delivery - til I get some more crap outa the room, don't even have room for pads.

Last 2 videos the drums were done from an XP-50 keyboard along with everything else. Video on DV thru firewire. Not sure how long it'll take before I can break ground on the new studio, it'll be about 1800 sf inside dim's total but working alone takes a LOT of time so I'm not holding my breath