Electric kit thoughts?

[taylor666]

My band desperately needs some new recordings so since the other guitarist is taking an audio production class, we would like to track the drums there. They only have an electric kit there but do you think I could make the drums decent using Drumagog and such? Hopefully they will track the drums at his class and send me the project where we will lay down the guitar and bass and possibly sample the drums, then send the project back to him where he will record the vocals and mix. My main concern is the cymbals but the teacher of his class has offered to help with the mixing and stuff so I'm hoping it could come out somewhat decent.

 

[Radd]

Yes, drumagog will work but only if the kit has analog outputs for each piece of drum (kick, snare, tom 1, tom 2, cymbal ect.) So the kit should have more than just a stereo output.
Now he can track each piece via midi but only if soloed as latency will make it to difficult to play along with the guitars/bass. Drumagog will work this way also but I believe you would need the pro version.

By the way, welcome to the forum.

 

[Radd]

Also if you use the search there are lots of great drum piece samples in here including some by Andy himself that you could use with drumagog.

 

[Nebulous]

If you are able to use the electronic kit for free, and it's in a studio (with sound proofing and all) you could try use real cymbals with the electronic kit. I've never tried it, but it could pass as a cheap demo/EP. Actually, I know of a local engineer that does albums with an electronic kit, so there's no reason you couldn't give it a go.

 

[Razorjack]

What kit is it?

 

[LSD-Studio]

depends on the kit, the rolands are decent!

 

[Fredrik-Ablaze]

It's worked great for Nocturnal Rites for the past two albums.
They use sampled cymbals as well

 

[them][nstrel]

Electronic drums will sound best if you record them as MIDI. you should not get any significant latency if you have a good soundcard in the system. Even if you do get latency you can simply use a monitor speaker for the band to hear his drumming with whatever samples sound best on the kit, but the actual recording will be captured through the MIDI output of the kit's module, it doesn't matter therefore if there's latency since it won't affect the performance. You can just move the MIDI data along on the track until it fits in time with the rest of the band. So after this you can output the performance with something like Drumkit From Hell, and it will sound great.

 

[musickey]

+1 Record the midi data, and if you have real cymbals mic em and record em

 

[taylor666]

Thanks for all the info. I'm not positive what type of kit/module they have at the studio but I'll know when I talk to my friend a little later. The teacher of the class is supposedly a really great engineer and has offered to help us out so it should be fun to experiment with. I'll let you guys know some more info on the studio/kit once I hear from my friend and I'll post some clips once we start working on it so you can give us some input on the mix.

 

[006]

Yeah, I was going to entertain this idea for my own studio: have a high-end electronic kit with more than enough pads to satisfy anyone, and let them use their own cymbals. If there are any latency issues, just use all the outputs from the module into the DAW, and let the band monitor from the module's sounds, those will be like 3ms latency at the most. Meanwhile record the MIDI data from the module if possible and run that into DFHS or something.

~e.a

 

[taylor666]

Apparently the kit is a Roland V something I forgot which model :/. I'm not sure if we'll be able to mic some real cymbals but my guitarist is going to get all the details when he goes to his class tomorrow. I'm hoping the results come out better than our previous demos haha. Also, I may post some clips of my amp to get some opinions on how to eq it better and such. Does anyone have experience using an Sm 57 through Line 6 Guitarport because that's the only interface I have available atm.

 

[them][nstrel]

Roland V-Drums. Probably 6KW's or something. Should be plenty good.

 

[taylor666]

BTW the class he is taking is offered by BOCES in place of some HS classes. It's 4 periods out of the day and it seems like a blast. I would have loved to have taken it but I just can't afford to take only 4 classes as college is coming soon. He showed me a bunch of pictures of the studio and it looks great. I'll be going with him as a guest once we get the whole thing recorded to help mix and such. I'll try to post some clips once we start tracking because we're all fairly new to recording and any input would be greatly appreciated.