there is an old trick to get metal drum sounds. tape quarters or half dollars to where the beater hits the drum and use a wood beater if necessary. metal drums are usually really flat with a thud and a lot of high end (click). so make sure you compress it hard, then eq it to bring out the ~4k click sound. try using a wider q until you get the sound your looking for.

as far as triggering drums, you can get a trigger like this: http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/RT7K/

or you can make one yourself like this: http://www.cse.ogi.edu/Drum/FAQ/triggers.html

then you can run them into any drum sampler that can take triggers (the best would be one that can let you load your own samples, so you can record your drum sound and then load it to trigger with the actual kick)

i am not that familiar with these devices, but i know they exist.

i don't know if it will have the sounds you want, but you can buy something like a alesis dm5 or find a used dm4.

might want to check around to see which one will have the sounds you want.

good luck,

steve

re

the sound I can get, the consistantsy is what I can't get.

you might try putting a limiter in front of the compressor. if you limit it pretty hard and compress it, you might be able to get the consistency.

steve

re

on tracking or on mixing?

I've done a lot of experiementaton with triggering. What I found is the best approach is just to mike the kick inside, with a heavy blanket over the kick drum to improve the isolation. Then, just record the kick drum sound. You don't even need a great mic really. Make sure the mic is picking up a nice sharp attack.

Once you've recorded the sound, you can either use a software based trigger (I've got a plug-in with Digital Perfomer that works really well) or if you need a hardware based approach, get a used Alesis D4 (>$100). It has twelve built-in triggers with lots of control. With either approach, you can fine tune the trigger threshold and output either a MIDI note, which you can use to try lots of different kick sounds, or just have the MIDI output of the trigger play a kick sound.

I got very frustrated with the live trigger approach, because it requires you to commit to trigger settings during tracking. Inevitably, your drummer will play harder during the real tracking than when you set up the initial triggering beforehand. Why commit to trigger settings before you have the track recorded?

You may have to shift the triggered sound to compensate for the latency introduced by the mic->trigger->MIDI->sound chain, but that should be a very predictable amount.

Lastly, you shouldn't use those stick-on triggers for recording. They don't work as well as a plain old mic'ed track. They are better for live work.

Good Luck!

i use a limiter when mixing. i usually use it as the last thing in my chain but only for punk/hard rock drum sounds. but for that style of music i usually end up with a second drum track that is soundreplaced (i use protoolz)

steve

I use drumagog and sound replace with only two samples that i've recorded, both of them on the high setting when you set up the samples. That way every hit doesn't sound exactly the same for the double bass. You can change settings so that the volume doesn't change with the hits. I've never used live triggers before but what i do in drumagog for me would probably work better than ever doing live ones.

K

i would have recommended soundreplacer or drumagog first if the first poster was using a pc. if you re-read his post, he uses a hardware based daw, not a PC based daw, so none of those will work for him.

steve

my mistake....

re

thanks for the suggestions, I don't know what I want to do yet.

I am just coming off of a shitty drum recording session where the drummer had a p.o.s. drumset that wasn't tuned at all and the kick and snare were as dead as hell.

is it possible in cubase sx3 to convert a recorded bass drum to a midi track?

since i'm using sx2 and can't convert audio peaks to midi i would really like to know if they finally fixed that problem in the new version.

Keep in mind that triggering the kick is much easier than other drums, since the bleed factor can create false triggers or missed triggers. If you try to trigger snares, you will have to really sweat the details.

I think since you're hardware based, a used Alesis D4 is your answer. It has 100 kick sounds and fairly decent (although far from cutting edge) and it has several parameters with which to control the triggering behavior.

when you have shitty drums that aren't tuned, it is your job as an engineer to make them sound good. there is something called the drum dial http://drumdial.com/ it is prety useable, far from perfect, but it gets you in the zone. then tune by ear after that. there is also stuff called moongel that you can put on the drums to help get rid of crazy resonances in order to tune the drums for recording. what sounds good for live drums does not necessarily sound good for recording drums.

just some tips i've learned by trial and fire.

steve