Electric Vs. Acoustic drums.

Electric Vs Acoustic Drums.


  • Total voters
    91
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.
 
don't forget to experiment with your tunings (pitch). Tunings that sound great to the human ear don't always translate well to tape, and tunings that sounds like crap to the human ear can sound great on tape. Drums sounds are easily manipulated through EQ, compression, gating, reverb, etc.

For example: for a great 80's hair band, stadium rock snare, try slacking off the snare head to the point where you see wrinkles in the head (a lot of wrinkles). With the lugs barely finger tight.
 
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