everyone with triggered drums: what do you do for cymbals?

[back to gray]

alright, i got an alesis d4. i've got to get triggers now and i realized (duh) you can't trigger cymbals. what i'm thinking im going to do is buy a eurorack 12 channel mixer and a couple of condenser mics to record my ride and my hi hat (the only cymbals i use). with the mics and the drum module plugged into the mixer and then plugged into my laptop for recording, should i get a good sound? i know i'll only be able to get one stereo track out of it all, but i can work with that if it will work. what mics should i get to mic a ride and a high hat for a decent price? any other ideas i haven't thought of?

 

[mikeh]

Most times, people with electronic (or triggered) drums use "real" accoustic cymbals. Keep in mind, if you record the cymbals in real time, the overheads will also pick up the sound of your drums (which will to a degree comnpromise your triggered sounds). In fact, even with electronic drums pads, the overheads pick up the "click" of the stick attack on the pads (although this is normally not too evident in the final mix)

You could make a seperate recording of the cymbals only, but it is difficult to do well.

You could purchase drum pads to trigger cymbal sounds from your D4 - but electronic cymbals rarely sound very decent.

 

[jeff5xo]

Just a question........and I'm not being sarcastic, why would you want to trigger your drums? If you have a nice kit and some good overheads, and a decent room to record in you can do wonders. Is that just not an option? Don't get me wrong triggers can be very effective, but the few times I've used them it sounds like someone "playing" a drum machine. If you're going to do triggers though, record the triggers with a click track, then come back and overdub your cymabals and hi-hats. You can put small pillows on your drums and bass drum to play along. Don't forget to let out the snare on the snare drum when you record your cymbals. Good luck!

 

[fritzmusic]

back to grey,

I've played around with this in the past but with a DM5. I used real cymbals with the triggered drums because I had some songs where I'd "swim" on the crashes. You CAN set up triggered cymbal pads for the D-4, however, the triggered crashes/open hats just sounded too "sampled" but the rides sound fine to me. Sampled cymbals are great if you just hit them once and let the sample play out the overtones but it doesn't sound quite right when you hit it a second time before the overtones are done...then you have to change your beats or cymbal hits to accomodate the unit's capability. Just some points to consider.

The first major problem I found when trying to use a room X,Y with condensors with real cymbals was that the mics picked up room ambience that didn't match the room ambience of the triggered drums and you *may* get something that sounds obviously patched together, or "just not right"....but maybe I'm just too picky. You can certainly try it and it may work fantastically for you or in the context of the song you're recording.

If you're going to use real cymbals, first try close-miking them with dynamic mics before condensors because me thinks condensors exaggerate the high frequencies too much at such close ranges. Real snare drums instead of the triggered ones makes things sound much more cohesive as well if you play with any amount of finesse. Hope that helps.

 

[Farview]

That will work just fine. The drum bleed will be kept to a minimum by close miking the hat and ride. try to get a pair of octava mc-012s