drum triggers! everyone's favorite! gotta question about em

J

jman1986

New member
I am starting to give in and really considering buying drum triggers. But i am curious to hear what people have to say about them, i hear good things and i hear bad things.

i am starting to fall in love with them becuase this producer named "joey sturgis" has been using them on his recordings for i think a year or so now, i never knew he did, i'd be driving in my car thinking to myself, how the hell did this guy get these drum tones? there killer, well i soon found out that they are triggers.

He doesn't record much death metal, when he does you can tell there triggers, but when he doesn't record death metal drummers it is very hard to tell if he got the tones him self or if he's using triggers with the steven slate samples lol. The new record from "The devil wears prada" is insane. The drums are triggered and the drummer does not play fast and do a billion gay blast beats per minute. he's a normal "slowler drummer" if you will. His drums sound great, im sure there was still EQ and Compression done to the tracks, but i no they were done with triggers.

So in my basement i can't get a good drum tone to save my life..! i am thinking of getting triggers, recording with those everytime i record drums instead of recording them with my mics. Then i wouldn't have to go into drumagog and replace the miced sounds with sampled sounds.

do u think i should do go pick up some trigs? or na?
 
Get some Ddrum triggers and just plug them into your preamps, just like you would a mic. Then use Drumagog to replace the hits.

You still need to use real overheads to catch the cymbals.
 
hey greg how about you answer mine first. What do you think of drum triggers and why, don't be a dick, be honest.
 
I would say only use triggers in addition to micing your drums. Use them more to enhance rather than replace. That's my opinion.I guess in any case you could just send your audio file into drumagog and you don't even need triggers. Triggers might be more effective using EZdrummer or something where you're going to use a whole kit.
 
jman1986 said:
hey greg how about you answer mine first. What do you think of drum triggers and why, don't be a dick, be honest.
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I think they're completely unnecessary in a home recording environment and a cop-out for lazy people that don't wanna even try to learn the nuances of recording acoustic drums. Most experienced people that use triggers typically blend them with the natural sound of the drums, and that's awesome, but you supposedly can't get good sounds at all, so what are you gonna do?

There. Now tell me why you can't get good sounds from your kit. I'll tell you who's fault it isn't - the drums.
 
Greg_L said:
I think they're completely unnecessary in a home recording environment and a cop-out for lazy people that don't wanna even try to learn the nuances of recording acoustic drums. Most experienced people that use triggers typically blend them with the natural sound of the drums, and that's awesome, but you supposedly can't get good sounds at all, so what are you gonna do?

There. Now tell me why you can't get good sounds from your kit. I'll tell you who's fault it isn't - the drums.
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Midi/synth/over-processed-loops are the only way to go.

...

.......

:)
 
I built all of my triggers. I used a Roland TD10 Expanded with them. sensitivity was awesome. I am in the middle of converting them back to acoustic however because I miss the feel of real drums. You can build your internal triggers and crossbars so as too keep them hidden. In my opinion, my built ones were better at picking up sensitivity than the name brand, on the head, triggers.
 
UPSdriver said:
In my opinion, my built ones were better at picking up sensitivity than the name brand, on the head, triggers.
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You are probably right if you are talking about the cheap redshots, but nothing beats the full fledged Ddrum triggers.
 
If you use Reaper, you can use some of the built-in plugs to blend in samples or replace entirely. If you're not, there are freeware plugs that will take your recorded signal and generate a MIDI signal you can use with a drum sequencer. Of course, this only works well if you've individually mic'd everything.

However, I'm going to side with Greg on this one - WHY can't you get good drum sounds in your basement? If you start defaulting to "I'm gonna sample replace everything from the get-go" then you're never going to know how to get a good sound from the kit itself. Like others have mentioned, many times a triggered kit is more a blend of a great sounding natural kit, with samples added in to enhance the sound, especially in metal where the drums need to cut through 8 layers of guitars.

You need to experiment with your setup and micing, tweak like hell until you get a good natural sound from your drums, and THEN if the style of music calls for it, you can experiment with triggering and sample replacement. Because the minute you get involved with a jazz or pop or indie rock project and you can't dial in drum tones for crap, you're screwed.
 
Discussing drum triggers is akin to giving an opinion on religion/politics;
someone is going to get angry, or offended! :D

To each their own, however I tend to get a great sound without. I'm against
triggers in the sense that they can allow you to play certain techniques that
would be near impossible to play without for even some advanced drummers.
 
Does it really matter HOW you get the result? Isn't the song the point?


In the studio, triggers allow you to easily stack sounds to make things bigger.

Live, triggers provide consistancy that a real drumset couldn't give you due to head wear, humidity, temperature, etc...

If they make it so you can play something that serves the song, so be it.

Even the best drummers would be hard pressed to play really fast double bass on a set of Speed Kings. Is it cheating when they use Axis pedals because they allow them to play faster?

Nobody says anything about shred guitar players having their action half a millimeter off the frets while they are using .007 guage strings on a guitar plugged into 3 compressor sustainers to give them back the sustain that they lost by setting up their guitars for pure speed. I'd like to see them sweep-pick thier way around a telecaster set up for slide...
 
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