Drum trigger question / DDrum triggers

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tubedude

tubedude

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I know that on the DDrum triggers, there is the Red Shot which isnt all that great, and the better one, whatever its called. The better ones are xlr output. How could I use that with something l**** a Roland TD-3, a DM5 or TMC-6 midi trigger converter? Is there an adapter? Just use a xlr to trs cable maybe?
Also, would I be better off buying a snare/tom trigger, or getting an mesh head snare and making all the drummers use it (some would freak out I know)
Last question... what would be a good way to trigger someone actual cymbals without buying a bunch of expensive black cymbal shaped triggers? I was wondering if those little cheap roland tom triggers could be mounted up near the bell somewhere or something, somehow.
Thanks.
 
You use a standard XLR to 1/4" mono cable, rather than a trs/stereo 1/4" end.


Why not mic the cymbals? have triggered drums, and mic the cymbals.

Do you own a drumkit you plan on using, or are you trying to have a set up where other drummers can bring in their own kits?

If it's other drummers bringing in their own kits- go for the top of the line ddrum triggers.

If you are going to do your own kit, I can tell you a few shortcuts to save some money. :D


Tim
 
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Other peoples kits. And if you saw the cymbals some people bring in....

Whats the shortcuts?
 
Everybody has their own preferences.

I don't care for electronic cymbals - it seems to me that whoever selected those sounds, has a different choice in wat a cymbal should sound like. The crashes always sound like 16" Crashes, and I HATE 16" crashes.
Hell, I'm thinking about asking Paiste to prototype me a 22" Full Crash in their signature line. It seems the older I go, I tend to like the sound of bigger drums and cymbals....or perhaps I liked it all along, but it took me until I got into my 30's to actually replace what I already had? I don't know.

Perhaps if you were triggering cymbal samples that were better it might not be too bad.

Personally, I would hand them a sheet when they hand you a deposit, and tell them on the sheet that if they do not show up with a complete set of quality drums and cymbals, that the session will be cancelled, until the time that they can come up with said drumset - no Return of the deposit.

And have a copy that whoever puts down the deposit has to read and sign.

That way they can't go, " Well, I never read that!"

because, there are two ways you can look at this - they have a shitty sounding recording and you don't care, or you do care because your name is going on it.



Tim
 
Don't trigger the cymbals. If you are using a D4, or something like that, the cymbals sound terrible. Real cymbals will sound better, always. You might need to do some heavy EQ and compression to make them work, but it will be better than the cheesy sounding ones in a module.

You want to make sure you get an XLR to TRS for the snare if you get the snare trigger. The snare trigger has 2 sensors (one for the head and one for the rim) so You will need that one to be TRS.

Your job is to record who and what your customer is. If they come in with equipment that you don't like, that is thier choice. That is thier sound. It is your job to put them on CD. Ultimately, this is thier creative outlet, not yours. If you only want to do bands that you think are worthy of your talents, you will need a day job to get buy.

What are you recording with? Drumagog could help if you are using a computer.
 
My day job will never go (night actually) UPS pays me $20 an hour so I cant ever leave there :)
These bands want me to take thier shitty stuff as far as possible, and when the heads are brittle and dimpled and dead, and all the cymbals are missing chunks, I have to do all I can do. And that includes sampling.

I dont know if you guys have heard the DFHS cymbals, but they sound better than damn near anything that could ever be recorded in a home studio with medium grade gear. The cymbals kill. ANd for the amount of metal I get, DFHS will make some people very very happy. The sounds are new-Nickleback-album quality, very very clean and big.

Most bands have equipment that I (and others) dont like. Hence the huge backline at a lot of high money studios. Its our job to make them sound better most of the time, not to make them sound like them. Tis true. :)
 
tubedude said:
My day job will never go (night actually) UPS pays me $20 an hour so I cant ever leave there :)
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Ahh, you work where I used to live.

You know where Standiford field was? When UPS bought the airport, they tore down my childhood home and made a parking lot out of the whole neighborhood I grew up in. :(

My cousin worked there for a while - he went through about a pair of shoes a month loading stuff. he said it's a great job if you don't mind working nights.

I'm with you on the DKFH.

I'm just wondering why you don't go ahead and either gte or buy an electric kit - and just make them play on it. It will save you a lot of hassles if you intend to trigger the entire setup.

I don't think you even need a MIDI module, but you will need an input device with enough separate inputs (such as the MOTU 24I/O ) so that every single drum and cymbal pad can go on it's own track. Then you assign the sounds to replace the individual drum trigger spikes (just like you would track replacement). But instead of a drumsound, you'll just have the recording of the individual trigger spikes.


You can also purchase the entire Paiste sound library for I think around $300 or so, and have high quality samples of virtuallyt every cymbal and gong and effect cymbal they make.


Tim
 
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tubedude said:
These bands want me to take thier shitty stuff as far as possible, and when the heads are brittle and dimpled and dead, and all the cymbals are missing chunks, I have to do all I can do. And that includes sampling. :)
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It is up to you to educate these bands as to what it takes to sound good. Sampling is good in situations like this, but cymbal triggers will make you lose the room and any reality in the recording. You might as well just sequence the drums.

If these guys want to sound great, they are going to have to step up and, at least, meet you half way. All of this should be sorted out in a pre-production meeting. Everyone needs to show up with new strings and heads. Cymbals with chunks out of them need to be replaced.
 
I'm with Jayrock. If you resample everything, you aren't taking their shitty stuff anywhere. He might as well not brought any of it. Someone has to take them aside and tell them that if they are serious about this, they need to at least cover the basics.

I do use drumagog often, and I can't explain why I think resampling cymbals is any different, but I do. I think it stems from my attitude about people who come into the studio wanting to sound like (enter million dollar production here) but can't come up with a usable instrument. A lot of this comes from the belief that everything can get fixed in the studio. It can't. As soon as that is possible, we will no longer have a need for musicians.

I feel, at times, that people should have to suffer with the sounds that they make and the performances they give. 20 some years ago, my band went into a studio for the first time. We weren't as prepared as we thought. We walked out with something that was a good representation of what we did that day. It was embarassing enough to make us practice until we didn't make those kinds of mistakes any more. If you fix everything for them, they don't learn to be good at what they do.
 
I'm the cheap guy in town. I do the best I can for broke bands that dont have any money, many of which are still in high school and just dont have access to good equipment, nor do I charge enough to supply them with a nice backline. I do have some decent things for myself, like a Mesa amp and great mics, so they get some benefits. I have a different attitude about it I guess, but using something like DFHS you arent losing anything, you are pretty much gaining, including cymbals. You still have all the room sound options and bleed and all that. Sounds real good. Getting them to atualy play an electronic kit might be tough though. Plus, I dont want them to know outright that they are being triggered, or at least think they are getting triggers mixed in with thier actual drums (which they are sometimes, depends)
The thing with micing everything and then triggering from there with something like drumagog or 'extract-timing' in Sonar, is that if you have something like a snare kicking up transients in the tom mic, or cymbals, then you get way too man false triggers, or lose lighter hits in the process, and its a pain to edit them all.
I do intend to mic the actual hats and ride, as those are a bitch to get right with samples sometimes.

Sillyhat- Its not up to me to educate these guys about what sounds good when they cant afford what they have to begin with. And I am more than happy to sequence the drums for them if I have to. At least they will be in time ;) Ya know? I'm the guy that wants to make them sound better, and they know it. It keeps me busy, and the money buys me more toys :)

Tim- Standiford field is now Louisville International Airport.... but still goes by SDF on the flight destination sheets. I work right smack in the middle of it, controlling containers on the inbound aircraft. We get about 130 UPS flights (all jumbos) in and out every night now, and thursday night we got close to 200 and we moved 1,541,000 packages in 6 hours. If you have never seen a million and a half packages in one place and what it takes to move em all, its a sight. Total chaos. Glad Christmas is over. Where did you live? Highland Park? MInors Lane Heights?
 
I'll cut some slack to high school kids. I have a big problem with a 35 year old, who didn't do anything with his life because he was going to be a rockstar, who comes in with a bottom of the line kit from 20 years ago that he never changed the heads on, or a Washburn and a Crate amp with dead strings. These guys usually show up with about $90 worth of beer and anothe $75 worth of weed and tell me the recording buget is $500.
 
tubedude said:
Tim- Standiford field is now Louisville International Airport.... but still goes by SDF on the flight destination sheets. I work right smack in the middle of it, controlling containers on the inbound aircraft. We get about 130 UPS flights (all jumbos) in and out every night now, and thursday night we got close to 200 and we moved 1,541,000 packages in 6 hours. If you have never seen a million and a half packages in one place and what it takes to move em all, its a sight. Total chaos. Glad Christmas is over. Where did you live? Highland Park? MInors Lane Heights?
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I lived on Standiford Avenue - about 50 yards from a runway. LOL We were also right near Bremner's baker - which was where the Girlscout cookies were made (I think that division was called "Little Brownie's baker" or something like that.) We left Louisville in 1980 when CSX bought out L&N, and moved all the employees down to Jax - man I hated that. I still don't like Jacksonville, and I've been here 25 years.
It was almost straight across the highway from Durritt High School and Prestonia Elementary. That was a killer place to live as a kid - There weren't a lot of other kids around, but we had a lot of room to play. We had an acre of land right in the city, and my nextdoor neighbors even had 2 horses and a pet duck! (Not to mention a gorgeous 15-year old daughter when I was 12. Ahh the fantasies she took part in. hahaha)

I just thought about something - you could try to create a trigger that would mount under each cymbal on a stand. That way you could get a pulse each time the drummer hit the cymbals.

I'll play around with some designs and see what I can come up with for you (A few months ago, I bought 100 trigger elements, just so I'd have a ton to mess around with.)


Tim
 
tubedude said:
Coolness. Where does one buy "trigger elements?"
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It's a Panasonic piezo transducer disc. They are typically under $3 each.
They are used inside littl electric buzzers; and as speakers inside those christmas cards that play music, but this particular type is generally too fragile to be used for this application.


You can get them from any of the following places. I would order a catalog, because then you can see what you're ordering.

www.digikey.com
www.mouser.com

For example, here are two from Mouser.

http://www.mouser.com/index.cfm?&ha...1&terms=256-PS201&Ntt=*256PS201*&N=0&crc=true
http://www.mouser.com/index.cfm?&ha...2&terms=256-PS202&Ntt=*256PS202*&N=0&crc=true


And you will need to read this page. :D

http://www.derksens.com/Beatnik_mirror.htm

This is the design I'm thinking about modifying to be used with real cymbals.

http://www.derksens.com/E-drums/Beatnik/trigger(Page13).htm


When I build it, and test it - I'll let you know how it works.


Tim
 
I tried the cymbal trigger about 15 years ago. It had 2 problems.
1. The decay of the cymbal makes it prone to mis-triggers and missed triggers. If you want any sort of dynamics, you will be pulling your hair out setting this up.

2. If you don't have the cymbals clamped down really tight, the cymbal will eventually spin, the wire will wrap around the stand and pull out.

At the time, we were using triggers to open gates on the mics around the drum kit. ( the band had such an over the top stage volume that the drum mics would feed back) This didn't work for cymbal mics, so we tried to use the triggers to trigger cymbal sounds for the monitors. It worked for single hits, but if he started riding the crash, all bets were off. The cymbals would spin and the triggers would come off about half way through the show. It was a clusterfuck.
 
Sillyhat said:
I tried the cymbal trigger about 15 years ago. It had 2 problems.
1. The decay of the cymbal makes it prone to mis-triggers and missed triggers. If you want any sort of dynamics, you will be pulling your hair out setting this up.

2. If you don't have the cymbals clamped down really tight, the cymbal will eventually spin, the wire will wrap around the stand and pull out.

At the time, we were using triggers to open gates on the mics around the drum kit. ( the band had such an over the top stage volume that the drum mics would feed back) This didn't work for cymbal mics, so we tried to use the triggers to trigger cymbal sounds for the monitors. It worked for single hits, but if he started riding the crash, all bets were off. The cymbals would spin and the triggers would come off about half way through the show. It was a clusterfuck.
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Yeah, but you guys had the triggers on the cymbals.

What I'm talking about doing is mounting the trigger to the stand, and you set up the sensitivity/threshold so only the first strike of the cymbal fires off the cymbal sound.

I use the triggers to control the key on Noise gates as well. I had to do all that type of stuff because my Bass player was running 3,000 watts into eight 15" speakers - that thing was like being in the room with a Freight Train. That was how I got into triggering to begin with.



Tim
 
Our bass rig was 40,000 watts into 40 4x15 cabinets. The guitar rig was 30,000 watts into 60 4x12 cabinets. We had some hurdles to get over
 
Farview said:
Our bass rig was 40,000 watts into 40 4x15 cabinets. The guitar rig was 30,000 watts into 60 4x12 cabinets. We had some hurdles to get over
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Yeah, but I was in a 16'x20' room!

:D
Tim
 
Our small club system (200 to 500 people) was 30,000 watts total.
 
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