Drums with 3 mics vs. drums with 2 OHs and a kick replacement plugin

DrJosh

DrJosh

New member
I'm just starting out recording and am considering tracking drums with minimal gear. The goals are to monitor my playing, to learn how to play so that the tracks come out well (becoming a 'good' drummer in the engineer's view), and to learn more about recording than I can by just reading this forum. I'm considering two different setups:

1) Audiobox + 2 OHs

2) Firebox + tubepre + 2 OHs + kick mic

With the first setup I'd use a drum replacement plugin on the OH tracks to trigger samples of my kick. I've downloaded reaper and some overhead tracks off the net and played around with a few of these plugins. They seem to do pretty well if you can isolate the lows. Not perfect, but I'm not great at messing around with the triggering parameters--I figure this is a skill that comes with practice. Maybe you guys with more experience with this sort of thing can weigh in here?

So, given the current drum replacement plugin technology, is this a decent alternative to the traditional 3 mic approach?
 
you can edit the snare and tom hits out and trigger those too. it's not as easy as the kick, but it's do able.

I did it once as an experiment. A friend of mine wanted me to mix his 8 track recording with just a stereo drum track. I did that, but then experimented with replacing the drums. I tried it on 2 songs and it sounded pretty good.

In one of the songs the snare was too loud though and it was really obvious there were 2 snare sounds happening. I ended up using the triggered snare to duck the original drum tracks. The cymbals ended up sounding weird. On the second track I tried it on it worked perfectly though.

here are the 2 tracks:

http://www.lightningmp3.com/live/file.php?id=15651

http://www.lightningmp3.com/live/file.php?id=15650
 
Thanks for that. I'm only really interested in triggering the kick--from what I've read everything else can be picked up pretty well with overheads, if the player is good. That's what I'm striving for.

Anyone else?
 
since you wouldn't have bleed from other drums in the kick mic, you could also use the recorderman overhead method and then put the triggered kick perfectly in phase with the kick in the overheads.
 
Exactly! That's what I'm after.

I played around with the demo version of apTrigga last night and got it to work really well on my OH test tracks--I think this is the way to go.
 
You may be doing this, but you can duplicate one of your overhead tracks to an extra track and eq the bejesus out of it in order to accentuate the kick frequencies and use that track to trigger the kick samples. Just don't mix the trigger track into the audio or it will sound horrid.
 
Yep, I read a post on this forum about that method so that's how I started out, but the better plugins have filters built right in--seems to make it a bit easier.
 
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