Sampled Drums vs. Acoustic Drums Question

[guitarist4life]

I spend a lot of time trying to get the best drum sound from my in-house kit, but no matter what I do, the samples I have always end up replacing them.

I would like to know how many of you either:

A.) Mix your natural drum tracks with samples to get an overall sound
B.) Don't use samples at all
C.) Use Samples to completely replace the drum sounds

So, what is it? A, B, or C? & Why? Thanks!

[shadewind]

Most of the time, no samples. Some of the time, samples mixed with natural sound. Not so often, samples replace the natural sound.

I like to make my own samples from the drum kit that I'm actually mixing in the samples with.

[anguswoodhead]

It took me about 7 years of experimenting to learn how to pull good drum sounds.
Some issues that I see as important -
1) Drum quality and tuning
2) Mic & Pre quality
3) Positioning of mics etc.
4) Eq and Compression in the mixing stage
I can make just about any half decent drum kit sound pretty s__t hot in the mix using these 4 key ingredients.

eg. I top and bottom mic the toms - matching mics, 2 into 1 lead with bottom mic out of phase.
1 only kick mic placed correctly always seems to beat the multi mic setups.
etc. etc.

[Musiclab]

I only use samples with a weak drummer or some ridiculous issue like a mic getting clobbered. If I do use a sample it's mixed in

[anguswoodhead]

Don't be afraid to go hard with EQ on all the drum mics - drums is one place where I do A LOT of EQ'ing - especially for Rock / Pop and if the kit sounds crap.
A really nice kit well miked usually doesn't need much EQ I find. (Jazz etc)

[jsox2409]

well.. very seldom do i use samples but when i do there off of the same kit im tracking. if the drums sound bad theres 3 possible things i can think of. : 1. Bad acoustics in the room 2. the actual tuning of the drum is bad 3. your not gettin the tone out of them u should be which could be from lack of fine tuning to not playing with enough attack to get the tone out of them.

But EQ'ing wont hurt the sound of the kit. even if its a great sounding kit with no EQ. u can always find something to tweak a little. for instance. i dont EQ my overheads. i add a little bit of 12 K and take out some 4K and about 400 Hz just a little. but the kick. i sweep out around 210 Hz. boost 60 Hz just a grunt and then go up to between 4K and 6K and make the gain level knob be about 2 o clock on the his

[Nutmeg II.]

Not using samples at all, but I might not be in the market of modern drum sounds in scrapmo core productions anyway.

anguswoodhead list is good, but the room acoustics is a big part of the drumsound!
A drum puts high energy into a room and this will get all the cluster**** stuff going you know from acoustics forums, like modes, nodes, comb filtering, reflections, reverb and so on.
All this stuff flying through the room gets back at you and wile in one case it might be just great sounding ambient or some resonance that nicely beefs up your kick.
In a not so great case it might be just a frequency that kills your tom or kick from producing a great sound.


Oh! And there is still the simple but ugly truth of the drummer is sucking like hell!