Dave Holmes
New member
of course acoustic drums!
people tend to kill music with samples. It's weird because they try to program midi drums to sound 'real' while recording acoustic drums and quantize and sample them to sound unreal...
There's various techniques to avoid this when using sampled (no one uses general midi sounds these days) drums though... Most hip hop producers (as they tend to use samples a lot) will layer their drum sounds up to get a thickness and leave at least one instrument (usually hi-hats) unquantised.
I use a combination of sampled drums (usually from jazz or prog rock records) and synthesised drums (the kick from a Korg ER-1 can sound beautifully disgusting when layered behind a couple different acoustic kicks)
One thing I never do is layer cymbals or hi-hats - my kicks/snares are usually made up of several sounds but cymbals turn to fuzz when you layer them.