ddrum redshot trigger question

[maskedman72]

with ddrum redshot triggers do you just run each one into a mic pre than direct to tape(like you would using a microphone) or do you have to run each trigger into a brain first before hitting tape?

i want to record a transient spike via the redshots along with each drum hit so that i can insert drumagog on the tracks that i recorded the redshot transients on for triggered sounds.

is this how they work?

[Ruphus]

Those trigger midi not audio, thus you need to plug them into a brain.
When you use only the midi you however lose the multi-sampling ( for lack of a better word ) ability of the DDrum which is what makes it special.

Ruphus

[maskedman72]

so they wont work the way i thought...dam.


so i would need lets say an alesis d4 to go with them.(could someone recomend a brain)

than what?

plug the triggers into the d4 than where do i go from there? would i go midi out of the brain to midi in on my interface? can ptle record midi and audio at the same time?

cant i use the redshots with drumagog or do i still need a brain?

thanks -jay

[Ruphus]

Hi Jay,

the pads would deliver information about velocity to the brain. In the brain there is memory on which is stored audio. So, from the brain you would go out with audio and deliver the audio to either your sound card or to any outboard device like equalizer or compressor and afterwards into the sound card.

The brain has midi ins and outs too, and you can just the same record the midi. Once the midi has been recorded you can still alter the audio within the brain. Like say you play the mid back from your sequencer and feed the midi data into the brain while letting different audio samples being played ( - and recorded into the soundcard ) than the ones you were originally listening to.

Hope I made some sense with my English.

Ruphus

[maskedman72]

i just recieved a p.m. that reads the following;


"Yeah, you can run the red shot triggers straight to tape, no brain required.

The triggers put out line-level, so you could bypass the pre too.

Good luck with it."

can anyone shed light on this?

do i need a brain or can i just go stright to tape and use drumagog?

[OKden]

That is correct. You can print them straight to tape without a preamp. The spike has plenty of level. The way you're wanting to use them to trigger samps works very well. They also are great for triggering gates if you so desire.

[Ruphus]

These guys must be joking. If you were to get any signal out of the triggers it likely wouldn´t be a drum sound.
Triggers are about midi, not audio. That is why they are called "trigger" for they only trigger audio in a brain, DAW or sampler.

Here a quote from another user with more detail for you.

A trigger can be mounted on a drum in several ways, but they all work the same way. The trigger itself picks up vibrations from the drum and sends a pusle to the electronic brain which in turn plays a sample.

There are two main types of trigger - ones that are mounted to the drum as a small compact unit, a la ddrum/ Roland and the smaller piezo triggers, a la Yamaha DT10/20s, Pintech.

The compact triggers mount on the rim of the drum and a small sensor lightly touches the head and while the other type can also be mounted on the head, they can also be mounted on the shell beneath/ touching the top head rim.

There are alot of choices about depending what you want - ddrum make their high end triggers that are probably the most popular amongst the pros, but are not cheap, but they also make the Redshot series which are good and reasonably priced. Roland are good, but again not cheap. Yamaha DT10/ 20 triggers are piezos and are quite reasonable.

However, if you want to incorporate electronics into your setup, I'd advise that you utilise your existing pads and place them around the kit before buying triggers. Even if you buy some triggers, you still need some sort of amplication to play the samples through.

Ruphus

[maskedman72]

i have never used triggers before so dont know a single thing about them but i am a bit confsed right now.

i am hoping others will chime in that are using redshots the same way i am wanting to use them and explain how they are doing it.

if i need a brain than i wouldnt need drumagog. if i do need a brain than i wasted my $$ on drumagog.

drumagog has a midi input mode. i believe drumagog acts as the "brain"

so i put the redshots on the kick ans snare than i plug them into the mic pres on my digi002r than i set up either a midi track or a audio track right?

if i set up an audio track than i have the drummer hit the snare and i adjust the gain on the pre until the redshot's spike is nice and large,than once recording is over,i insert drumagog on that track and wola, i have a sampled snare to blen with the original.

or i set up a midi track and plug the trigger into the pre and it will record each hit as midi rather than audio than i insert drumagog on that track and i am all set?

sorry for the confusion fellas.,just tryin to figure it all out here.
-jay

[Youn]

1. You need a brain to convert the triggered signal into MIDI data, then your sequencer needs to record that MIDI data, then Drumagog can use that info (MIDI data) to trigger it's own sound.

2. Recording the Redshot impulse alone (straight from output of redshot to line in of soundcard) might work though, I don't know. In this case you wouldn't need a brain, you'd simply use Drumagog to trigger samples based on the recorded 'spike' (AUDIO data) - or whatever signal supposadly gets recorded. No MIDI is involved, you would record an audio track for each drum.

3. Take the Redshots out of the equation completely. Close-mic every drum and, again, have Drumagog trigger samples based on the incoming AUDIO levels. The advantage here is that you can use the recorded material and layer in the samples for added effect (not complete replacement of the actual drum sound), which alot of people like to do. Again, no MIDI is involved.

hope that helps a little, if you already bought redshots then give #2 a try or wait for someone here to tell you it works and then give it a try.... oh, or did you already try this?

[maskedman72]

no i have not bought the redshots yet but i do have drumagog and just using the snare mic to trigger dosent cut it too well with the music i record so i am looking into a different method for more accurate triggering without the bleed.

thanks -jay

[BrettPortzer]

This is truly unbelievable.

PLEASE REFRAIN FROM POSTING AN ANSWER IF YOU ARE JUST GUESSING.

Thanks...

You can absolutely do what you were describing in your first post, record the transient output of the redshots to an audio track, and use that to trigger drumagog with later.

I do this all the time. I use the original triggers with the XLR output, but it's the same thing. Basically you will just get a little spike everytime the drum is hit, sounds kind of like a stick hitting the rim. But, the key is, you get that with no bleed, and since it's actually touching the drum, the signal arrives earlier than the signal to the mics... Which is how you can use it into the sidechain on a gate, to open gates if you are mic'ing the same drum that you have a trigger on.

Anyway, PM me if you have more questions about it. I've done triggering in every different combination you can think of.

Good Luck!
[brett]

[drundall]

one note, if the guy hits like a puss you'll need a pre or you'll need to add gain to the waveform later. Guys that hit hard make your job easy, plug 'em right into the converters as mentioned.

[maskedman72]

Originally Posted by BrettPortzer

This is truly unbelievable.

PLEASE REFRAIN FROM POSTING AN ANSWER IF YOU ARE JUST GUESSING.

Thanks...

You can absolutely do what you were describing in your first post, record the transient output of the redshots to an audio track, and use that to trigger drumagog with later.

I do this all the time. I use the original triggers with the XLR output, but it's the same thing. Basically you will just get a little spike everytime the drum is hit, sounds kind of like a stick hitting the rim. But, the key is, you get that with no bleed, and since it's actually touching the drum, the signal arrives earlier than the signal to the mics... Which is how you can use it into the sidechain on a gate, to open gates if you are mic'ing the same drum that you have a trigger on.

Anyway, PM me if you have more questions about it. I've done triggering in every different combination you can think of.

Good Luck!
[brett]

thanks brett!

that was the exact answer i was hoping i would get. i could have sworn that i had seen other people doing what i was describing a long time ago. i thought i was going crazy for a second there.

so you said that the trigger spike arrives a bit sooner than the mic signal...i am assuming that i will have to do some sliding around to line everything up right?

man i hope this method works better than just trying to insert drumagog on mic'd kick and snare tracks.

thanks!

-jay

[BrettPortzer]

Yea, it's much easier, it's a cleaner signal, no bleed. Also, as Darian says, you may or may not need to run the triggers through a preamp. I find that I most often need to.

Of course, the guy that hits consistently is the easiest to trigger... And usually the guy you don't need to trigger... So, mostly I am running the triggers through a preamp stage.

And yea, if you mic a drum and put a trigger on it, and record them both, the trigger will be earlier. Which is cool for a few things, but if you are going to use this technique to replace the drum sounds with samples, you may want to slide them back to where the mic signals are. Or not, depends on what the delay is.

It ends up being a lot of extra tracks to record to be able to do this, but it works well.

Try it out!

[brett]

[Farview]

I record triggers all the time, that is, record the audio of the trigger and use it to trigger drumagog. It works just fine. You can also send the outputs back to a module if you want to use those sounds.

[maskedman72]

thanks guys, so my next question is what triggers are the best? are the ddrum redshot pros the best chioce?

[faeflora]

Roland also just came out with their own triggers.

BTW a potential problem with recording the signal from the triggers and building your drum patterns off that is that the drum software or sequencer or whatever may not have any "velocity sensitivity". Basically you'll have no dynamnics.

[Farview]

Originally Posted by faeflora

Roland also just came out with their own triggers.

BTW a potential problem with recording the signal from the triggers and building your drum patterns off that is that the drum software or sequencer or whatever may not have any "velocity sensitivity". Basically you'll have no dynamnics.

With Drumagog, this isn't a problem.

[maskedman72]

just got hold of a ddrum pro snare trigger and ill try it out friday for the 1st time.

i hope this will solve some of the nightmare i have had in the past.

roughly how many milliseconds faster does the trigger signal arrive?

thanks guys

-jay

[Farview]

Originally Posted by maskedman72

roughly how many milliseconds faster does the trigger signal arrive?

thanks guys

-jay

It depends on how far the mic is from the drum. I think it's 1 ms per foot. (I could be wrong)

I've never had a problem getting it to line up with a mic on the same drum. If you line it up with the snare in the overheads, you will lose the sense of space. (Which is why I don't)

[maskedman72]

Originally Posted by Farview

It depends on how far the mic is from the drum. I think it's 1 ms per foot. (I could be wrong)

I've never had a problem getting it to line up with a mic on the same drum. If you line it up with the snare in the overheads, you will lose the sense of space. (Which is why I don't)

the snare mic will be far less than a foot from the drum...more like 2-4 inches.

so you are saying you dont need to do any lining up?

thanks -jay

[Farview]

Are you going to keep the original snare in the mix with the sample? If you are fully replacing the snare, you don't have to line it up with anything. (unless your daw doesn't do delay compensation) If you are going to have both the real and sampled snare in the mix, you will have to listen to see if you notice any flaming.

[maskedman72]

no delay compensation here (pt le)

it will be a 50/50 blend of the original and the sample.

what is the simplest method to listen for the flamming? just solo the 2 snares and nudge till it sounds good? what about phase?

[Farview]

Drumagog has 2 ways of dealing with this.
1. The delay is displayed on the front page of the plugin. You just nudge the track backwards by that amount.
2. There is a fixed latency version of Drumagog, so you always know how much to nudge the track over.

[maskedman72]

Originally Posted by Farview

Drumagog has 2 ways of dealing with this.
1. The delay is displayed on the front page of the plugin. You just nudge the track backwards by that amount.
2. There is a fixed latency version of Drumagog, so you always know how much to nudge the track over.

i have been using method 1.

thanks for all your help!

[maskedman72]

Originally Posted by maskedman72

just got hold of a ddrum pro snare trigger and ill try it out friday for the 1st time.

just tried the trigger last night and to anyone else out there wondering the same things i was, you DO NOT need a midi brain to use the triggers as others have said. you just put the triggers on the drums and plug them in just like a mic and run them into a pre and record it. no problem.

thanks for all of the help!!!