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Originally Posted by kittonian For a lot of studios recording real drums is simply not an option. Either there's not enough great pre's, comps, and eq's around to do the job, not enough mics, the room isn't up to par, or any number of other things that inhibit the ability to get great sounding drum tracks from a real drummer. |
IMNSHO, that's a cop-out.
If all you have are three mics and a mediocre room you can still capture great tracks from a great drummer. The key is making sure that all the other bits
are up to par. From the drums to the drummer to the parts he's playing...if those are together then they'll outshine a less then stellar room. Granted the kit won't sound like it was recorded in a beautiful room, but I've encountered kits tracked in beautiful rooms that sounded like complete poo...where it's unsalvageable and we have to start fresh. Experience conquers all.
YMMV but mine hasn't.
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I'm not going to use the word "trick" here but I will say that there is an exceptional way to produce drums, using a real drummer, but not actually using an acoustic kit.
Roland makes an amazing product called the TD-Pro V-Drum kit. It's not cheap (about $5295 if I recall correctly) but it's a complete drumset with a hi hat, cymbals, 4 toms, kick and snare. It's made to trigger sounds in a very realistic way and transmit midi messages to a DAW.
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A few years ago I was hired by a progressive rock band to clean up their mixes and finish the record. The drummer played a V-Drum kit so we didn’t have the programming hurdle to contend with. The drummer was great; the parts he played were fine but the sounds...ohh man...the sounds...
Totally fake.
A few years ago I was hired by a progressive rock band to clean up the mixes and finish the record. The drummer played a V-Drum kit with (thank Mirtha!) real cymbals so we didn’t have the programming hurdle to contend with. The drummer was great; the parts he played were great but the sounds...ohh man...the sounds...
Totally fake.
The sampled cymbals are also a dead give-away that the kit is electronic. That's actually worse then the machine-gun snare.
None of the tones complemented each other and it sounded like four different kits mashed together with the result being not unlike samples from a drum machine. After much trial I scrapped ALL of the V-Drum sounds except for the kick (IIRC that might’ve gotten trashed too) and some specialty stuff. In place I used samples of real drums and with a little bit of work and some great ‘verb it sounded more like a highly processed real kit, but a real kit none-the-less.
Since then my thoughts on the V-drums haven’t changed…they’re the best of the electric stuff but are no replacement for the real thing. If all you need are pads and triggers, then there are cheaper ways to do get there then the V-Drums. Besides $5K can buy you a decent kit and a handful of microphones to record real drums and if you want the sound of real drums…then you have to use real drums.