Any tips on recording roland electric drums

[Genie]

Does anybody have any good tips on recording electric drums. A friend of mine just bought a new roland set and i recorded it thru a mackie 1202 into a soundblaster platinum into cakewalk and got an ok sound but it wasn't very satisfactory. I ran the left and right outputs from the roland board into the mackie. One problem (besides the mediocre soundblaster) was that the kicks were not even close to as full as what the roland board sounds like thru the headphone output. The cymbals didn't come thru hardly at all even though the faders were all the way up on the roland board. Should i use compression? Should i pan a little. Should i use the headphone output instead (probably not)...? I'm a little lost. Thanks...

 

[Bassman]

Hi,

One way you could go, which could be time consuming but effective would be to record the drum track as a MIDI track (midi out of the Drums to midi in of the PC and vice versa).
Then using CAL or cut and paste seperate each drum into its own track. once that is done you can play say, only the midi track of the kick drum, record it on its own audio track, and then you have full mixing, equing, compression etc... of just the bass drum track. I usually seperate it like this, Kick, snare, Toms, Crashes, ride and Hi-hat. It requires you to run through the song 5 times recording each individual part, but the results are worth it. And while yoiu have your whole drum track as a Midi, you can also quantize it or fix any glitches. Makes you sound like the perfect drummer..!!

Later!

 

[Buck62]

Each seperate sound put out by the drum-module can be adjusted individually for tone, volume, reverb, etc. etc.
Roland, Yamaha, and Alesis constructed thier modules so that each individual can customize the sound to his or her own preferences.
Roland modules are a bit light on the cymbal sounds, when compared to the Yamaha and Alesis units... but, you can get a decent, balanced sound if you bring the volume levels of the snare and toms down just a bit.
Make your adjustments on the module first, that's what it's made to do.

 

[memo]

I've had a similar although not as worse experience with my new Roland set. I had gotten the TD-8 brain and some mesh pads a couple of weeks ago and just yesterday I decided to record some drum tracks for a song I have. I set my "custom kit" all nicely, it sounded beautiful through the headphones. But when I plugged the main outs to the Ins of my Delta 44 and started recording, the sound I got was different; although not bad.

But I think I know the reason, while playing with headphones you hear a lot more of the reverb of the drums. You don't hear that that much while playing it through speakers. My toms sounded extremely flat in the recording, but when I increased the reverb on them from the module, the problem was solved. Try setting the reverb to a large room (I use a large studio) and increase the individual reverb settings on each drum, see if that helps.

Also try to have a hot (loud) signal, not so loud that it starts clipping but loud enough. The track get's more lively at louder levels.

And last but not least, could it be the mackie? Did you try just directly running into the Sound Blaster?

Hope this helps...

 

[RichB]

I was recording drums with a Casio through the conventional MIDI conectors. After being frustrated with the puny sounds my soundcard was producing I decided to record the drums from the Casio via "Digital Audio".

Another words try your Roland through a pre-amp (I've been using a Marshall Head) then from the direct LINE OUT from the amp to LINE IN on your computer.

This has made my drum tracks sooo powerful!!

 

[Freis968]

This is a good thread. I have not yet been able to find an easy enough PC based software audio recording program to use. I as well have a Roland V Drum set and this post piqued my interest. Anyone recommend an extremely easy PC audio recording program?