Adding effects to electronic drums (td-20)

R

rgraves

New member
OK, so here's the deal. I have the roland td-20 drum set, and have finally set it up how everyone here recommended which is so that it tracks all the pads seperately. Previously I was tracking it as just one stereo track which left no ability to turn up the snare or turn down the high hat post tracking for example.

Here's my problem, when you record the drum kit with the direct outs, it doesn't send any of the effects, except for EQ and compression. Which, from what everyone tells me, is perfect, because no engineer would want the other effects permanently attached to the tracks.

Well, that is all good and fine, but the problem is, due to my inexperience in ever recording real drums, I have no idea what types of effects I would experiment with. I am trying to get a good hard rock and/or metal sound, but the effects that are listed in some of the kits that roland provides are such as reverb, ambiance, flanger, delay, chorus, pitch shift, ring mod, enhancer, phaser and beat delay.
I don't even know what ring mod, enhancer and beat delay are...I have tons of plug ins, but I don't even think I have something like those?

Basically, I am now perplexed on which post tracking effects I should be playing with on the drum tracks, I would like to recreate the drum kits similar to how they sound when played on the TD-20, but have no idea where to start. I am just trying to get a good standard sound for the genres I mentioned. Nothing ground breaking or new...

please help!
 
Can you go in and see what effects the Roland would be applying? You could write them down and then look for similar effects.
 
well, that is the thing...I was on the Roland website, and placed some posts there and there is some debate as to which effects are used on which kits, and it is a bit confusing when you look at the multi effects on the unit, as to which ones are on, or not. According to some over there, all of those effects are on all the kits, to a certain degree or not.

So, rather than trying to get someone to figure out which effects are used on specific kits on a drum set which many of course do not even have, I am just asking a very general question...please can someone tell me what all effects people commonly use on drums?
 
I use a TD10 kit and use all 8 outs.

I normally only use slight compression in the drum module and perhaps dial in some ambiance. Any eq, verb, etc. is added at the board to allow more real time control.
 
Oh man, I'm gonna overkill this question and someone is gonna give me the red chiclet...

The etc part of your post is exactly what I am asking. What would you use "at the board". Like I said, there are some crazy effects available that I would never think of using, but apparently people are using them...umm, maybe I should try to post this as a general question on recording drums, since the roland td-20 part of it probably doesn't have any bearing to the answers I was looking for.
 
I have the SPD-8 and I like to use a small bright room reverb on the whole kit to make it sound less sampled. I don't compress because the samples are already compressed. Sometimes I EQ but mostly that's the kick to get it to work better with the bass guitar. I sometimes add a bright plate reverb to the cymbals to improve their sustain (SPD-8 samples are pretty short). Gated/non-linear or delayed reverb on the snare sounds too 80s so I don't do that much. A slap-back echo on the snare and toms works sometimes. I sometimes add a touch of exciter (tuned high) to give some air but more modern gear might not need that.
 
I dont have any experience with the module that you have,..but I have a few others. On every one of them you are able to acess the effects and manipulate them. As someone said earlier,...all you have to do is look at what they already have on there and tweak from there.
One thing I've had luck with is,... get the drums sounding how you want through your monitors,..stereo mic your control room(experiment with distance etc) and mix that stereo track in with your other tracks. It's kind of a poor man's OV's. But,..it does open up the drums somewhat.
Hope it helps,...

Take 'er easy
Calwood
 
You're correct the etc. could cover a lot of ground. I will try to elaborate.

Effects in general for drums (vs. specific effects in the module) can very from song to song and each person has there own view.

As indicated, I prefer to send the 8 tracks from the Roland with some ambiance (dialed in the module) to give the effect of a drum kit mic'd in a room with some bleed (with little or no ambiance assigned to the kick). Bleed is a natural part of a drum kit and often is what indeed makes it sound like one instrument, rather than several seperate instruments.

Drums in general (in particular snare and kick) can often benefit from some compression - less is normally better (perhaps a 2:1 or 4:1 ratio - no more than a 10:1 - unless you're going for a specific effect). I often dial off some low eq on the kick and toms to help with the attack. Snare eq depends on where I need the snare in the song. I rarely put any reverb on the kick (unless I'm going for a big rock sound) - but in general I don't want to muddy up the low end (you need to leave room for the bass guitar), but the snare and toms normally get some reverb (always be careful about too much reverb). I often dial in some gated verb on the snare (but as already indicated - that has become cliche' - so a little goes a long way). I may use a small amount of verb on the hat & cymbals (depending on what I need) but again, less is more - since electronic cymbals are the weak link, I tend to keep them low in the mix and processing is rather moot.

In general, the decay on drums is too fast to get much benefit from other time based processing (chorus, , etc.) however, on a rare occasion I may use a slight chorus the cymbals - if it is a moody musical piece. However, since I keep the cymbals down in the mix it really doesn't matter.

I hope you find that a more helpful reply.
 
mikeh said:
You're correct the etc. could cover a lot of ground. I will try to elaborate.

Effects in general for drums (vs. specific effects in the module) can very from song to song and each person has there own view.

As indicated, I prefer to send the 8 tracks from the Roland with some ambiance (dialed in the module) to give the effect of a drum kit mic'd in a room with some bleed (with little or no ambiance assigned to the kick). Bleed is a natural part of a drum kit and often is what indeed makes it sound like one instrument, rather than several seperate instruments.

Drums in general (in particular snare and kick) can often benefit from some compression - less is normally better (perhaps a 2:1 or 4:1 ratio - no more than a 10:1 - unless you're going for a specific effect). I often dial off some low eq on the kick and toms to help with the attack. Snare eq depends on where I need the snare in the song. I rarely put any reverb on the kick (unless I'm going for a big rock sound) - but in general I don't want to muddy up the low end (you need to leave room for the bass guitar), but the snare and toms normally get some reverb (always be careful about too much reverb). I often dial in some gated verb on the snare (but as already indicated - that has become cliche' - so a little goes a long way). I may use a small amount of verb on the hat & cymbals (depending on what I need) but again, less is more - since electronic cymbals are the weak link, I tend to keep them low in the mix and processing is rather moot.

In general, the decay on drums is too fast to get much benefit from other time based processing (chorus, , etc.) however, on a rare occasion I may use a slight chorus the cymbals - if it is a moody musical piece. However, since I keep the cymbals down in the mix it really doesn't matter.

I hope you find that a more helpful reply.
Click to expand...

OK, yes, very helpful...thanks!!

I just was surprised to hear from some engineers that effects like distortion and chorus were used on drums...I would never have thought to even experiment with that...I think I'll stick with the basic effects that I usually use for now. Thanks all
 
I have heard recordings in which certain drums (most often the snare) are processed in various ways with some overdrive (distortion) or chorus or a leslie effect, etc. Naturally, this is done for some specific or unique sound.

Some engineers/producers enjoy creating unique sounds and some artists want to have "thier own" sound - and studio tools can provide that.

I am more of a musician/songwriter than engineer - so I prefer to use more traditional sounds and spend my time playing and writing rather than creating unique snare sounds.

I respect people who have the creative drive to create new sounds (say running a snare through a distortion) and I in no way think that is a bad thing - I simply don't have enough time to record all the stuff I've already written and choose not to spend my limited time experimenting in that way.

One additional comment about recording electronic drums (and given that the Roland kits allow you to dial in ambiance - this is less of an issue) often sending e-drums through speakers into a room and recording the room sound can add some warmth to e-drums (naturally the room has to have a decent sound). Blending some room sound to the direct outs of a drum module can add warmth, depth and a tad more realisim to e-drums.
 
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