Which do you prefer when recording drums. Recording the raw Acoustic Drums, eq and compress, and know it's all you.
Or use drum triggers to trigger good sample's. I know some people do a mix of the two. I am trying to get an idea of whether I want to record my acoustic drums, or spend $200 on some drum triggers and do it that way. May take the head-ache out of trying to get that perfect drum sound when I'm not in a studio.
Also, the drum triggers (5 of the them) are through a single midi port in the sound card, or through TRS? I have Cubase and many programs, do I need a seperate unit for the triggers to trigger samples, or can I trigger samples from cubase? Thanks!
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As far as the triggers I use yes. It gives you the dynamic range
As far as the triggers I use yes. It gives you the dynamic range and you can "solo" one out. for the kick for example, you cna make it ONE kick sound so its great for metal and rock so it just pounds away solid every time. As for the snare. yes, it detects and sort of picks up samples, hard, soft, etc... That is just my experience with drumagog
when i mix, even the best drums i've recorded, well tuned, and i
when i mix, even the best drums i've recorded, well tuned, and in a good studio, i always will use a sample to compliment the drums if I don't have _exactly_ the sound I want.
i know this sounds a little weird, but i am recording to make bands happy, not to make me happy. if they have a particular style they want it to sound like, i will use samples or whatever else i can to make them happy.
i also use sound replacer, adjust gain, and hits with better sounding ones, and use enough compression to kill a horse if necessary.
The Rules for Amazing Drum Recording!
1. there are no rules
2. see rule 1.
You will need a device to convert the trigger data to MIDI data
You will need a device to convert the trigger data to MIDI data if that's the route you want to take. Any electronic drum brain will work but they are expensive unless you can find an older one.
I use an Alesis D4. It's a rack mount drum module that has trigger inputs on it. They made a couple different models and you can usually find them on ebay for a decent price.
What you would do is plug your trigger's 1/4" jack into the trigger inputs. You would then assign a MIDI note number to that jack. Plug the MIDI output to your computers MIDI in. Then when you play the drum (activating the trigger) a MIDI note number will be sent from the unit to the computer.
Of course, once you've got all the MIDI data recorded, you need to pipe that data to some sort of drum thingie. Battery, BFD, DFH, MicroTonic or any old drum plugin should work. Heck, you can even output it back to an external drum machine and record it's audio.
Drumagog is a great program. You can do what you want without ever needing triggers or MIDI. But the pro version will create MIDI data from your recorded audio drum tracks. So you have that option as well.
I've found that because of my budget, my mics don't sound like I
I've found that because of my budget, my mics don't sound like I want them to. I'll upgrade yaeh, but in the meantime, what I do is I use 2 over heads L/R, one kick, one snare. I record those and use drumagog to trigger the kick (its a natural kick sample), and the snare if I want to. I found that this time, I miced the bottom of the snare and I prefer that sound (it also made it easier to gate other noise). And the overheads will pick up the natural sound of everything, so I can mix in the kick and snare accordingly. Now, if youre talking about toms, cymbals, I have NO clue how to do triggering, handling physical attatchable triggers to teh acoustic set, and using a MIDI/drum machine to soundcard/audiointerface. I've never done that, but thats just a suggestion if you are handling snare/kick.