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I have an SR-16 which i think sounds quite good and am recording some Heavy Rock tracks using Pro Tools via my new POD XT Live.

(If you want to get great guitar sounds and a unit thats easy to program via Line 6 edit using your mouse so you dont have to keep reaching down to the floor to tweak nobs and punch buttons get one of these!)

I read an article somewhere that said something about getting the bass guitar to sit better in the mix with the drums, something along the lines of routing the bass drum to the Aux out of the SR-16 to a seperate track in pro tools and then sending both the bass drum and bass through a compressor to tighten things up.

Has anyone any experience of this or used a similar technique? I havent bought my bass yet so I just have the Left and Right of the SR-16 recorded into channels 1 and 2 in pro tools with the panning of the drum kit done in the SR-16.
Any advice would be appreciated.

Comments

pr0gr4m Sun, 08/20/2006 - 22:03

I use an SR-16 and I send the kick to one of the aux outs and the snare to the other. That way I can record them separate from all the other drums and process them separately. If you sync the drum machine up with the pro-tools, then you can record each drum individually. You'll need to run a few passes and set each drum to it's own output but if you need to do it that way it works.

As for that mixing technique you read somewhere, I don't exactly know what that "something" was that they did. However, I recommend that you just start recording. Don't try to use all sorts of techniques that you read right away. They are good to know and you will learn from them and get good ideas, but you need to start out simple, getting the basics down. When you actually have problems getting the kick and bass to sit in a mix, THAT's when you need to start gettin' funky.

RemyRAD Sun, 08/20/2006 - 23:14

I have the same SR 16 and I do the same thing that pr0gr4m does. The bass drum is routed to one of the auxiliary outputs and so is the snare drum, to the other auxiliary output. You can then also record the stereo outputs that include the rest of the drum kit. Four channels of drums, is so much more versatile than 2.

The technique you may have read about is when we used to take the bass drum track and split its output to be used as a trigger source to an "upward expander" that I would pass the bass guitar through, that would give an additional little level boost or punch, to the bass guitar, every time the bass drum hit. Something I only did a few times and mostly for disco. Now I don't think that would make the bass guitar sit better in the mix? It does however make it punch through better. I haven't tried to do that in software. At Media Sound in NYC, in the late 1970s, they had a slogan I still live by. AN OUNCE OF PUNCH IS WORTH A POUND OF SOUND!

I put on too many pounds!!!
Ms. Remy Ann David

pr0gr4m Mon, 08/21/2006 - 08:43

To stray a bit from the topic, I bought my SR when it first came out and I loved it. I think it's a great drum machine and it's amazing that they are still on the market. Alesis made other drum modules after the SR, but they don't make them anymore. Other companies make new drum machines every couple of years and forget the old ones. The Alesis is still going strong. It has to have been 10 years since it was first released.