What triggers do you use?

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jrhager84

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Just curious as to what brands are nice to use. My goal is to get good DKFH sounds from my kit, so the room sound won't be an issue anymore. Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions?
 
Just to give you another alternative, You might be able to convert the playing to midi notes within your recording program with the right plugins. Which is basically what expensive triggers do in the first place, isn't it? Of course for this to work best, the drums should be recorded onto seperate tracks.
 
DDrum all the way. Just do not skimp out and get the cheap redshot series.. Make sure to get the pro series or whatever they call them, there is a major difference.
 
jrhager84 said:
Just curious as to what brands are nice to use. My goal is to get good DKFH sounds from my kit, so the room sound won't be an issue anymore. Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions?
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First, you will need something to plug the triggers into (i.e. A drum brain) if you want to trigger DFH samples. DFH uses an extended version of Midi that is Toontrack specific.

For a brain I'd recommend a roland TD-3 but, you could use any number of brains for this. Internal sounds of the brain are unimportant, you just need the midi output. The TD-3 is realitively cheap and offer many inputs as well.

Second, what do you mean by "get a good DFH sound on your kit"? Are you intending on triggering the samples in "real-time"?

Typing this on a black berry sucks!
 
DKFH - Drum kit from hell plugin. I meant using the awesome sounds of that plugin with my actual inconsistent human playing. I could program all of my drum parts, but I wouldn't be too happy about that, ya know?

I too was also thinking of just using some plugin to convert to midi, but I don't even know where to start with looking at something like that. Any ideas?

I don't care how I get there, but I want DKFH sounds on my kit (just in a recording environment). So if I can just mic my drums and convert later, that is fine with me. Thanks guys!
 
http://www.widisoft.com/english/widi-vst-readme.html
http://namm.harmony-central.com/Newp/2003/Midifier.html

These are by no means "recommendations", simply suggestions based off a quick search. I believe that Sonar (probably?) and Cubase each have their own built in solutions.. maybe Reaper does as well. It's getting more common anyway, so it's worth seeing if your own application does have such a feature. One of my issues of SOS or Computer Musician has a feature on Audio to MIDI converting, if I come across it again I'll let you know, cause they had some good suggestions.
 
Mistral said:
Just to give you another alternative, You might be able to convert the playing to midi notes within your recording program with the right plugins. Which is basically what expensive triggers do in the first place, isn't it? Of course for this to work best, the drums should be recorded onto seperate tracks.
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You are confusing the controller with the actual triggers. The triggers are the things that are attached to the drums.
 
jrhager84 said:
DKFH - Drum kit from hell plugin. I meant using the awesome sounds of that plugin with my actual inconsistent human playing. I could program all of my drum parts, but I wouldn't be too happy about that, ya know?

I too was also thinking of just using some plugin to convert to midi, but I don't even know where to start with looking at something like that. Any ideas?

I don't care how I get there, but I want DKFH sounds on my kit (just in a recording environment). So if I can just mic my drums and convert later, that is fine with me. Thanks guys!
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Drumagog will convert audio (the signal from the triggers) to midi.
 
So is there absolutely no way to get away with no triggers? I thought you could set the threshold on an actual recording, and when it crosses the threshold it'd convert it to a midi note (drums are just single hits, so it doesn't have to be complicated). Maybe I'm just way lost and way off base. Here's what I've gathered (I might've misunderstood now that I think about it):

I use my actual drum mics to mic my performance.

I run each signal through a plugin that converts to midi (configuring the threshold)

Assign each track a midi host plugin (DKFHS for example)

Give each track it's corresponding sound & final adjustments

Voila! DKFHS sounds with my analog performance! Is that just stupid of me to think possible, or am I on the right track? Thanks dudes!
 
Farview said:
You are confusing the controller with the actual triggers. The triggers are the things that are attached to the drums.
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I believe he's referring to what I was trying to do. Actually mic'ing each individual drum, and using the actual signal to midi, not just triggers. I'm so confused right now LOL
 
With a program like Drumagog, you can mic the kit with mics, then use Drumagog to convert the audio to midi to use with dkfh. You can also just trigger the Drumagog samples.

The only thing that the triggers do for you is keep the bleed of other drums and cymbals from triggering your sounds.

Triggers are used in place of microphones.
 
Farview said:
With a program like Drumagog, you can mic the kit with mics, then use Drumagog to convert the audio to midi to use with dkfh. You can also just trigger the Drumagog samples.

The only thing that the triggers do for you is keep the bleed of other drums and cymbals from triggering your sounds.

Triggers are used in place of microphones.
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You can plug the output from a trigger directly into a pre and have drumagog convert that to midi?
 
ReaGate is made specifically to do this. As long as your app can run VST you are set.
 
Myriad_Rocker said:
You can plug the output from a trigger directly into a pre and have drumagog convert that to midi?
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Yes. I do it all the time. You can plug a mic into a drum brain (with the right cable) and use that to trigger the sounds.

A trigger is just a transducer, as is a mic. It's advantage is that it only picks up the sound of the drumhead that it is touching. No bleed.

The guts of a trigger are the same as the guts of an acoustic guitar pickup, (the ones under the saddle) and we plug those into mic preamps all the time.
 
Farview said:
Yes. I do it all the time. You can plug a mic into a drum brain (with the right cable) and use that to trigger the sounds.

A trigger is just a transducer, as is a mic. It's advantage is that it only picks up the sound of the drumhead that it is touching. No bleed.

The guts of a trigger are the same as the guts of an acoustic guitar pickup, (the ones under the saddle) and we plug those into mic preamps all the time.
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Wow. That's cool. That's something I have not thought of.
 
Let's get real here though. Think about the tools you've got: You can use your mics, bleed or no bleed.. It doesn't technically matter how the hits sound (aside from the overheads, I would recommend keeping those live and only replacing the kick, snare and perhaps toms) so really you could use methods you normally wouldn't use to mic each drum for maximum prevention of bleed.. As farview said a trigger operates on the same principles, so logic suggests you don't need to bother going out and buying any.

Yeah, Drumagog converts to MIDI, so do many other plugins. Figure out which one works best for you. Normally Drumagog is used to replace crap drums with better sounding samples which are loaded directly into the Drumagog plugin. What you want is different, you want to convert each drum audio track to a MIDI track that preserves the performance right down to the dynamics, and you can later add the DFH plugin to them. So maybe DG will do that for you no problem, but chances are you can find something else that will do it for free.
 
Mistral said:
Let's get real here though. Think about the tools you've got: You can use your mics, bleed or no bleed.. It doesn't technically matter how the hits sound (aside from the overheads, I would recommend keeping those live and only replacing the kick, snare and perhaps toms) so really you could use methods you normally wouldn't use to mic each drum for maximum prevention of bleed.. As farview said a trigger operates on the same principles, so logic suggests you don't need to bother going out and buying any.

Yeah, Drumagog converts to MIDI, so do many other plugins. Figure out which one works best for you. Normally Drumagog is used to replace crap drums with better sounding samples which are loaded directly into the Drumagog plugin. What you want is different, you want to convert each drum audio track to a MIDI track that preserves the performance right down to the dynamics, and you can later add the DFH plugin to them. So maybe DG will do that for you no problem, but chances are you can find something else that will do it for free.

The best way to add DFH to the resulting MIDI, while paying attention to resources, is get each drum converted on their own tracks first, then paste all the midi notes into one midi track, then apply the DFH to that midi track only. Otherwise you would have several instances of DFH eating up 100's of MB each.
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And the best way to do this is.... get yourself a set of freaking triggers and a cheap drum brain, spit the midi directly into a MIDI track and/or trigger the DFHS live and be done with it.

All this talk about using Drumagog and/or using mics for triggers is complete B.S. and I guarantee you will not work if you want to play/track/trigger in real time. You will spend more time dickin' around trying fix miss triggers, mic bleed and a long list of other nonsense. But it’s your time…

I apologize for getting a bit heated but come on....
 
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Like i stated before, it is going to be ONLY for recording. I want DKFH for the sound library. Im only goingto replace my drums and my cymbals will remain.
 
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