Digital Drums and Acoustic Cymbals

  • Thread starter Thread starter MAV
  • Start date Start date
M

MAV

New member
I want to set up a hybrid drum kit consisting of digital drums and acoustic cymbals. I love the flexibility that MIDI provides in the world of percussion, but almost every individual cymbal sample I've heard is lacking in presence and tone. For that reason, I thought I might try to just do away with those sounds and record them live during the performance. I figured I'd just hang a couple of overhead condensers to collect the cymbals, but then I realized that I would be getting much of the "thuds" of the drum pads as well. Is this something that could be addressed with EQ? Mic placement? Any other ideas?
 
Record it the way you just said, then when you're done, during the mix, put a noise gate to the overheads and set the threshold so that the hits on teh pads won't get thru.
 
SpotlightKid83 said:
Record it the way you just said, then when you're done, during the mix, put a noise gate to the overheads and set the threshold so that the hits on teh pads won't get thru.
Click to expand...

Would that work? I thought once the threshold level is reached and the gate opens, its open to any sound, so when it gets loud enough it will just let everything thru. Maybe I'm wrong.

I would definitely EQ and also experiment with mic placement. You can cut all the low freq's for the cymbals and get rid of any major flaws from those thuds and just leave some clicks, which might even be beneficial (possibility give the click more liveliness?).

With mic placement, I wonder what happens if you put the OH's upside down, in between the cymbals and the toms :confused: You'll still get bleed thru, just hopefully not as much.

One more option, rubber doesn't really thud (like an octagon practice pad). You could doubletrack, first do the midi drumming with no cymbals and then with only cymbals. Cover the heads with thick rubber and theres virtually no thud. Hope any of that helps.
 
you could get those mesh heads for a regular drum kit and trigger that, but that would probably cost a lot more than just not worrying about the thud of the pads in the overheads
 
I've got mesh pads on my kit now, which are much quieter than rubber, I know, but still make enough noise to be picked up by the overheads. It really may not matter, as the noise will probably be small and will certainly be masked by the actual drum samples, but if I had say, a cowbell on a pad, then that's going to be funky when blended with the overhead recording! :D
 
Mesh Heads! I have real cymbols and virtual cymbols on my kit, and mesh heads on the E-Drums (Hart Dynamics). The sound from the mesh heads is relatively un-obtrusive, and the bleed that makes it into the overheads gets pretty well masked by the drum samples. Also, I use Gigasampler and Peter Erskins living drums, so even the E-Cymbols are real.... Real, as in real cymbols recorded at Ocean Way Studios by Allan Sides.
 
Last edited:
Yes, every time the gate is opened by the cymbal hits it will let everything thru, but the pad hits will be drowned by the cymbal hits.
Mesh heads and triggers are better, but make sure you remove the bottom head of the drums too.
 
I've done this many times by overdubbing the cymbals after the fact. I play the elec. cymbals while tracking, but they are unplugged from the drum brain.
 
Why don't you record each of your cymbals and then trigger them as a sample?
 
Well, you'd think that would work, but there is something that I can't quite put my finger on about cymbal samples that doesn't sound right when put into the context of a song. Plus, there are tons of pre-recorded samples out there to use already, as Robert D mentioned. Still, something is missing. I think it has something to do with the nuances of the way the cymbals are hit after certain drum passages, such as rolls, fills, flams, etc. A pure sample of a pure cymbal hit doesn't capture the myriad of different ways that cymbals can be hit during the course of playing the drums. This is similar to the problem that would occur if one were to just play a standard sampled note of, say, a guitar, saxophone, or pretty much any other instrument when the note is triggered - the expression is lost.

The e-drum manufacturers have done a pretty good job capturing the expressive hits of the drums themselves with the pressure-senstitive pads that can determine the velocity of the hit and play the associated sample accordingly. But even then there is something lost in the way that a drum reacts to being hit while it is still resonating from a previous hit. This aspect doesn't seem to stand out in my hearing of a recording of a drum kit, but it does when hearing the cymbals. As I said, I don't know why it does, but I can definitely recognize it when I hear it.
 
I agree, real cymbal samples are better than the ones from a drum machine, but still... they don't sound quite as real. You'd have to have multi-layered samples and it would still sound fake.
 
I agree, real cymbal samples are better than the ones from a drum machine, but still... they don't sound quite as real. You'd have to have multi-layered samples and it would still sound fake.
 
Yeah, that's why I have real cymbols and hi-hats along with the v-cymbols. Frankly I think non looped samples that use a big stack of seperate velocity samples with no interpolation or filtering is damned close, better than real if you have shitty cymbols, shitty mics, and a shitty room. But there's so much variation in sound you can get from real cymbols, there's a ways to go before they've got it nailed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top