Recording drum tracks with electronic drum kit!?!?!

[lnd]

Hi Im interested in hearing from anyone who has managed to do the following.
I would like to record a real drum player using an electronic kit - say roland drum kits
and record his midi performance into protools. thing is i want to be able to use say battery
and get him to play with those drumkits (The roland built in sounds are terrible). Once I haev his midi
performance I can tweak and replace sounds as required. (Yes I also tried sound replacer but there was
the bleed issue on other tracks to worry about). My aim is to record the real feel of a drummer whilst beeing
able to totally experiment with drum sounds on the fly.
Anybody tried this????

[e-cue]

I haven't done it with battery. I've done this a handful of times (with a lot of aid from the producer who was very familar with his 'system') for some pop songs where we bascially used the newer Roland brain to decide which sounds to use from the Midi performance (which was emailed to us).

I highly suggest you record the cymbals live.

[Dave Martin]

You can do htat (though I don't have any experiance with using softsynths with electronic drums), but it's not going to sound like a real drum set. You mentioned 'bleed'; a drum set is a single instrument, not 8 or 9 all played at once. If that's not a problem, go for it.

By the way, I've had MUCH better luck using DDrums rather than the Roland V Drums.

[DRAGONTHEORY]

First of all.... MIDI in Pro Tools Sucks..... Not the right DAW for midi anything..... Use LOGIC.....

What I do is this......

I lay down a loop for the Artist to record to.... Setting a basic groove..... The artist records Guitar... Bass.... Vocals.... to the loop...... I then Beat map the bass syncing the click with the bass..... showing the imperfections is a good thing when recording Drums.....

I use Roland Vdrums to trigger BFD2....

The drummer plays along with the bass....guitar and scratch VOX..... The straight groove no fills.... So when you Quantize the Track..... It sucks up to the bass rather than a straight 16th or 8th Q.... Knowing the Midi Parameters is very important....
After you Flex the other parts up to the Drum and bass parts.... Finally you record the Fills and Cymbal hits.....

I have had amazing results using this method to record MIDI drums.... Very real....

In BFD2... You can easily bounce every track to audio.... Super easy.... and I mix from there....

This method works well for me when Im going for particular flavor..... Motown.... Old school rare groove type of Feel .... For this.... Quantizing is the enemy.... But in Logic the Q is Tricky. You can get any feel you are after with a little help from the parameters......and outboard Compression.......

[relayer]

It's amazing that people on these boards give advice without having any real experience or idea what they're talking about.

You can't assume that an acoustic drummer is going to be able to come in and give a good performance on V-drums. There's an art to playing these and making them sound realistic. The learning curve is fairly steep.

Do not use standard V-drum module sounds. They suck. Battery doesn't handle cc4 well, which is what is required for V-drum hi-hat usage. I use Ocean Way Drums, but Addictive Drums is a great inexpensive program that can give you very realistic performances. Here's a short solo I did with my ekit and AD:

www.sph-prods.com/AD.wav

That's BS about using real cymbals. If you know what you're doing, your software cymbals can be very realistic.

Pro Tools is the worst possible program for recording MIDI drums. Logic if you're on a Mac or Sonar on a PC. Quantizing is not your friend. With a competent edrummer, it's unnecessary in any capacity.

Good luck.

Steve

[MonkeyAdam]

When working with midi instruments, I almost always record the midi just in case. BTW, DP is very powerful for midi.

[doug hazelrigg]

I know some guys who do this every day

www.retpercussion.com

They use real drum heads triggering such apps as BFD2, Superior, Addictive -- you name it

YouTube - mikey vpt

[PlatinumSamples]

This was recorded in Pro Tools as MIDI.

Rail

[socialmoose1570]

Originally Posted by PlatinumSamples

This was recorded in Pro Tools as MIDI.

Rail

minds=blown

I've also heard the same thing about using real cymbals to supplement virtual drums, but the post about that being BS can be true too. Lord knows that better samples come out every day. If you find Virtual Instruments that are really phenomenal you won't need to replace cymbals but it can't hurt to try it both ways. Maybe do a few performances of each and then keep what you want.
Best of luck with your Vdrums.

[TheWhiskeyShot]

Hi mate, Rail's video is certainly compelling evidence that realistic performances can be had from triggering samples.
Personally, I have a Roland TD12 and all of the Platinum Samples packs for BFD2 (plus Steven Slate and Superior).
I've found that as long as you're willing to take the time to help 'shape' the sound you're after then yes, realistic drums can be a possibility.

If I were you I would get my hands on a copy of BFD2 and then just play buddy.

You won't know until you dive in. But, you WON'T regret diving in - believe me.

I've had drummer friends visit where some can't get used to the feel of the v-drums and some absolutely LOVE them.
It's down to personal ability really... A good drummer can paradiddle on custard as far as I'm concerned and anything less they are kidding themselves.

I love BFD2 and use it every day - personal and business use. On a personal level, I get hours of enjoyment from using it every week (I've been a drummer for 12 years) just doodling around playing along to the radio or practicing my rudiments.

Business wise, when tended to and blended with the other elements of a song/jingle/etc. my clients LOVE the sound of BFD + Platinum Samples stuff.
It depends on the material. Some needs Andy Johns. Some EJB.

Good luck - but remember, what works for some won't for others.
This game is about trial and error and EXPERIMENTING.

Go, make noise.
MIDI noise, but nonetheless...

[Cover'd]

I did exactly this for a band a couple months ago

The drummer wanted to use his Roland kit, but I suggested he bring live cymbals as that, for me, is where the difference really lies. I simply hooked up the MIDI output from the Roland 'brain', adjusted the pad gains a little (so that it wasn't sending full 127 velocity on every hit) and triggered Superior Drummer 2.0 in Logic. Added a couple condensers for the cymbals and we were away

The rest of the band played live with him and all monitoring was sent directly from Logic using the SD2.0 sounds

It worked well and as above, you don't want to get hooked up on quantising everything so that your 'looking' at the music rather than 'listening' to it, but you do have the added bonus of being able to correct a lazy bass drum or snare hit for example simply by sliding a MIDI note here or there

I've attached a couple samples of what we achieved (bear in mind this was done on a MacBook Pro, Logic 8, Saffire Pro40 in a barn - not a nice studio ). The demo version was done by the band themselves using the Audio outputs from the Roland kit, the other version is what I did with them using MIDI, SD2.0 and live cymbals

[Joe Porto]

BFD2 worked well for me with the Roland TD-8, and has MIDI control templates for the Roland and other kits. I still found I needed to tweak the hi hat settings, but once I did, it sounded great.

As far as the player, the only thing I could see as an issue with an acoustic drummer switching to electric drums is the hi hat controller. That is the only real adjustment I had to make when playing the Roland kit. Perhaps the newer Roland hi hat controller that mounts on a hi hat stand is better.

[El-Roy]

I've done this using the V drums and EZ drummer and had great results. The best part about samplers such as EZ, Superior, BFD, etc, is that they give you room mics and over heads rather then just plain drum samples. Therefore giving you room tones and allowing you to adjust your bleeding to make it sound more realistic.

[Steven Slate]

We've installed over a dozen vdrum/steven slate systems in LA and are doing eleven installs to various producers in Nashville later this month.

Here is Glen Sobel playing SSDs on vdrums:
video

and if you go to the Slate Drums Homepage, check out in the full mix demos "THE VOID", and "ANIMAL", and "NASHVILLE" all tracked on Vdrums.

[Resistance]

What electronic drum kit does everyone recommend?

[Subby32]

roland td-3 brain with all mesh heads midi'd out to an mpc 3000 quantize turned off, then the midi out of the 3k into an RME fireface on lowest buffer settings into Cubase 5 running Ocean Way Drums

Groove will be PERFECT, as will the sound
plus all the editability you'd ever need.
MPC 3000 is great cuz with quantize off and the PPQ resolution at 96, it is actually quantizing to 384th notes, so even when ur off time, ur on time
and playing along to the MPCs click track is better than a DAW's as it is more rock solid and on the beat/slightly ahead then the lazy Cubase midi

[relayer]

Originally Posted by Resistance

What electronic drum kit does everyone recommend?

A good used TD-6 or TD-6V is probably the best VST kit for the price. A TD-3 doesn't have MIDI IN, so if the drummer needs extra pads/cymbals, he's SOL. On the newer models, a TD-9 would be a good choice. If you have the money ($7000) a TD-20 is obviously the way to go - positional sensing on all the triggers. Yamahas work well with VSTs as well. Stay away from Alesis.

Steve

[speerchucker]

Originally Posted by Subby32

roland td-3 brain with all mesh heads midi'd out to an mpc 3000 quantize turned off, then the midi out of the 3k into an RME fireface on lowest buffer settings into Cubase 5 running Ocean Way Drums

Groove will be PERFECT...

No, it won't. The biggest problem with these systems (and I've been doing it for maybe ten years) is latency. The chain, above would have a ton, I'd guess well over 15 ms by the time you reach the converter.

The absolute fastest route is to use Drumagog (or something similar if it exists) and trigger directly from your pads. No brain, no midi converter. You will have to give up positional crossfading, but you'd probably be using a real snare, anyway (I hope) so that's no biggie.

Any crossfading or midi conversion will add LOTS of latency. If a rhthm section is trying to play along, this will make an audible difference. Also, BTW, the latency on two Roland V-brains I owned wasn't even consistent within themselves. On one (the top of the line, several years ago) IIRC the toms were about 6-8 ms behind the actual stick-hit, and the kick was about 12ms! - not so easy to compensate later.

What I did at the time was to add two "dummy" overhead mics, near the hats & ride, and send that to the cue system. This helped everyone lock into the pocket. I also recorded direct off the pads on separate tracks, so I had a reference in order to manually compensate later.

With Drumagog on a fast computer (and not with Protools TDM!) you can get things down to about 2 ms and still have decent dynamics.
=========

Also, FWIW, When I switched from the Roland pads to Hart Pros, all my session drummers started loving the system. I think it's mostly a visual thing, you just feel like you're sitting at a real kit.

[Dubster]

I did the following with a band that couldn't afford to track in a decent room: bought a set of triggers, borrowed some Roland cymbals, HH and brain, and tracked the midi using a little Powerbook/Mbox1/M-Audio Uno/Headphone amp set up in the bands rehearsal space. Worked fine, although, of course I had to go back and even out some of the hits and get rid of some false triggers. Upside to doing it this way? The drummer got to play on a kit that, for the most part (aside from the cymbals/hihat) that felt natural and comfortable, monitoring set up was simple and fast, since all he had to hear was the click (again, I'm sure it was a little odd for him not hearing the cymbals/hihat) and didn't have to deal with any potential issues with the drum plug-in while getting the parts down. Using the actual roland kits probably has many advantages, but this worked out pretty well. Good luck!

[Marty Long]

We record with 3ms of latency on a Quadcore with no problems.. with a few plugins on the track we'll do 6ms which isn't a problem for 99% of drummers.

[Jay Dee]

Originally Posted by Marty Long

We record with 3ms of latency on a Quadcore with no problems.. with a few plugins on the track we'll do 6ms which isn't a problem for 99% of drummers.

Is that round-trip latency with buffers, etc.?

[PlatinumSamples]

I use BFD2 in Standalone at 64 samples fed analog into our Avid 192/Pro Tools... so latency isn't an issue. The Yamaha has a direct USB connection to the Mac which is faster than using a MIDI connection. Bobby played to the Pro Tools click track and he had zero problems with latency.

Rail

[tekn0]

Originally Posted by PlatinumSamples

This was recorded in Pro Tools as MIDI.

Rail

awesome, video and i love that snare from kit 1, i also find the extra snare #2 sounds a lot like it and also works well with kit 5 has in the manual it says to use all the extra snares and kicks with kit 5

Im still in love with evil drums

[relayer]

Originally Posted by Jay Dee

Is that round-trip latency with buffers, etc.?

I assume he means he's got the audio buffer set to 3ms or less. The above stuff about inherent MIDI latency in Roland modules is crap. If MIDI latency were really an issue, everybody's keyboards would have it as well.

Anyway, I make all my drum tracks on V-drums, and latency is a complete non-issue.

Steve

[Subby32]

@ speerchucker

Would you mind going into a little more detail with how you trigger piezos directly into drumagog?
I tried messing around just plugging the V-Drum snare directly into my API A2D, drumagog plug enabled and then midi output to OWD....
maybe the latency is less but how do u get stable and accurate dynamics?
For me the dynamics are very jumpy especially once u hit a certain level.
Which algorithm are you using? simple i assume?

And now there is the issue of rim shots not triggering, no cross talk cancellation, high hat openability??

Do u process the signal with some plugs before you hit drumagog?

Also in defense of my setup, i'm not saying theres no latency however it is consistent latency so once you adjust you're playing to it (if you even have to) things stay right where they are intended. The MPC3000 is known to be spot on for tightness, and the Fireface has midi jitter of within just 1m/s. Are you saying that going through the mpc is adding to the overall latency? if this is the case, a simple midi y cable will fix that, as one end could go from vdrums to mpc unmonitored, and the other end straight into the midi interface into drum vst.

Anything you could share would be appreciated man!

[wbrs]

2Box

[speerchucker]

Originally Posted by relayer

I assume he means he's got the audio buffer set to 3ms or less. The above stuff about inherent MIDI latency in Roland modules is crap.

It's not crap, and watch what you write, lest you make an even bigger fool of yourself.

I did very careful testing, many times.

-And no, not the buffer setting per se, the total i-o latency, which is what counts. That's a combination of buffer and Drumagog settings. You have to have a simple session, and a fast computer to pull this off, but it can be done.

[speerchucker]

Originally Posted by Subby32

@ speerchucker

Would you mind going into a little more detail with how you trigger piezos directly into drumagog?

Hey Subby. Basically, I put the piezos into a line driver / impedance converter, then run line level into my PC. (this isn't critical, but it helps) I then put a simple gate inline with each one. I don't like "simple" mode. Dynamics seems to disappear, though sometimes (with an understanding drummer) you can just get it to work. I usually use the next mode (Been a while, & I forget the name) and set it to its fastest setting. This gives almost the same speed, but better dynamics.

I also record the unprocessed clicks from the pickups to other tracks (y-ed before Drumagog) as both a reference, and as a timing-thing for the band's cue mix. Blending-in those clicks helps everyone lock in. Oh, and I always use real cymbals, and most of the time real snare as well. A few pads add extra cymbals we don't have, of other f/x. I'm basically after the kick & toms.

After recording, you can of course change the Drumagog settings for better playback dynamics, and shift the tracks accordingly.

I personally then take the rhythm tracks and import them into Protools TDM / Mac for the rest of the session & mixing. 'Aint nothing like TDM for mixing, but it really blows for midi.

Must get some sleep now.

[relayer]

Originally Posted by speerchucker

It's not crap, and watch what you write, lest you make an even bigger fool of yourself.

I did very careful testing, many times.

-And no, not the buffer setting per se, the total i-o latency, which is what counts. That's a combination of buffer and Drumagog settings. You have to have a simple session, and a fast computer to pull this off, but it can be done.

So when someone disagrees with you, they've made a fool of themselves? Ego much? My point wasn't directed specifically at you, but since you've taken it that way, so be it. If Roland modules had the type of latency you're talking about, the kits would be unplayable, and people wouldn't pay $7000 for a TD-20. I'll bet your amount of very careful testing many times, doesn't amount to 1/10th of the time I've spent behind my kit practicing rudiments with VSTs that are spot on in a Piano Roll.

You've had your experiences, I've had mine. Myself and others have posted examples of edrums triggering VSTs with undetectable latency. Posting a click track demonstrating this tremendous amount of latency that is commonplace in your setup should be easy enough. Go for it - I'm all ears.

BTW, Drumagog isn't 10 years old - what did you do beforehand?

Steve

[ysf]

This is the only way I record drums.

I use a Roland TD-20 triggering one of the following.(everyday for three years now)
(and here are my thoughts on each)

1.Addictive Drums. My favorite by far. And just updated (about time) so variable Hihat actually triggers well with the new mapping. Sound is big. Processed. which may turn off some people. I love it though. Not much tweaking needed. First choice.

2. Steven Slate drums. Also has mapping that works well. Sound is good. All the toms seem to be the same between kits though. Not a lot of variety in the sounds. Lots of snares though. Tied for second choice. I play light and have to play harder than normal to get the sound I want.

3. Superior 2/EZX's/EZDrummer. I have a love/hate relationship with these programs. The sounds are good. But to me always need to be tweaked to fit a mix. The sounds are very natural but a bit dry for my tastes. And they trigger way quieter on the TD-20 compared to AD. There is a global way to fix this in the Roland brain but it will change the settings for my other programs. With all the expansions it probably has the most sound options. Hihats have to be tweaked manually to get them to work and its not easy. Tied for second choice.

4. Battery 3. First one I bought. I never ever trigger this. It's pretty terrible for that. Mapping is a mess between each kit. Great for electronic sounds (drum machine type) triggered from a keyboard though. No hihat mapping. Has a ton of sounds. Not many that sound natural acoustically. My favorite is actually the marching band sounds.

All in all. For e-drumming the first three will work. I tend to run a separate audio track and use the Roland Hihats from the multi out while using Superior 2/EZDrummer. The hihats on that program are just a pain. Never quite respond accurately enough.

I think Ocean way and Steven Slate are very similar in that they use Native Instruments Kontakt as there sampling engine.

But as a drummer I just really enjoy turning on Addictive drummer and running through the presets. Its fun!!! No work to get a good sound.

And I am sure there will be a hundred people that think just the opposite but this is my opinion.

Years ago I used a Simmons set and used real cymbals. But I think the current Romplers have good enough cymbals that you won't need to use real cymbals. Especially with the Td-20 that has multiple triggers per cymbal and choke ability.