Kick drum: triggering? samples? drumagog?

  • Thread starter Thread starter drummerdude666
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Farview said:
Go to the last tab and set it for advanced at the top of the page. This may help. Also, go into visual mode and adjust the threshold so the hi-hat doesn't trigger. If you play with the filters on the first page, you might have better luck making it ignore the hi-hat. How much bleed do you have?

Here are a couple gog files
www.farviewrecording.com/special/bigkik3.gog
www.farviewrecording.com/special/flot65.gog
www.farviewrecording.com/special/PLudwigKick1.gog
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Thanks for the tip but I wasn't using drumagog.
I did try the demo once and it was much easier to fine tune than the free thing. I may one day buy drumagog but not until I go to a sound card with more input channels.
 
Thanks for all your help guys, Ive messed around with some samples/drumagog etc and this is my plan.

Buy Drumagog and buy some ddrum triggers, they'll make the audiospike, which then triggers drumagog.

Mixed in with that will be my subkick mic....hopefully i can then get the sounds i want, almost instantly, so when recording bands I wont have to waste their time with mic placement.
 
drummerdude666 said:
Thanks for all your help guys, Ive messed around with some samples/drumagog etc and this is my plan.

Buy Drumagog and buy some ddrum triggers, they'll make the audiospike, which then triggers drumagog.

Mixed in with that will be my subkick mic....hopefully i can then get the sounds i want, almost instantly, so when recording bands I wont have to waste their time with mic placement.
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Have you tried it with the ddrum triggers yet?

Do you know for sure that it will work? It should work, but that doesn't mean postiviely that it does. That was why I wanted someone who was recording on a PC and had Drumagog to try it out.

I mean, essentially what your doing is using the PC for a Sound Module, and instead of the Trigger's audio spike triggering the sound live, it's recorded, and THEN triggers the sound you assign to it.

Ultimately - IF THIS ALL WORKS IN PRACTICE AS IN MY THEORIZING - what this means is that you could forego an actual drumkit for recording, and just use drumagog and a set of homebuilt drumpads. (Which means lower sound volume, which means you could record later, and also have less soundproofing. It could mean a lot of these things - especially for those who are living and recording in apartments.)
 
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Nope, I havent tried it. I won't be getting the triggers for a few weeks (if it does work) so i have some breathing space.

But does anybody have ddrum triggers with drumagog to try this out.
 
Or does anybody just have triggers that they could try to record straight into something. As long as that works I am pretty sure you would have no problem with them rest of it. Also I have heard about people making their own triggers. Does anybody know of some good websites or past threads that tell you how to make them? If I do end up buying one how much does the quality really matter. I was looking online and I found two bass drum triggers. One was $55 and the other was only $10. Is there really that big of difference? I would think the only difference would be the response. Would I have trouble with the $10 not picking up hits or picking up too much? Couldn't most of this be solved with gating of limiting afterwards anyway?

Wow thats a lot of questions. I hope someone does try just to record a trigger and see if we do indeed get an audio spike.
 
well if you use the free VST plugin or drumagog, you need only record a sound... and set the threshold correctly and then it will replace it. and that free drum kit sample was sweet. btw, Tim Brown, your theory, has already been done before... http://www.smartelectronix.com/~koen/KTDrumTrigger/ - not that difficult, but I like to use real drums in addition to the samples and triggers.
 
So does the quality of the triggers really matter? Will I have trouble picking up stuff with the cheap one? And grn do you have any idea what is happening with acid? I have the plugin in the folder you told me to put it in according to your pm, but it still doesn't seem to work. After you put it in the folder how do you get to it in Acid? Mabye I am looking in the wrong spot. I don't think I am, but it is possible.
 
As long as the trigger works (in this case the free VST plugin) and the samples you use are high quality, and it sounds good to you, then it is good. Drumagog may be better, but you can get great results with a bit of experimenting... I replaced a kick drum on a song I recorded with this and it's simply amazing. I'm just now getting in to using that free drum kit (http://www.naturalstudio.co.uk/ns_kit7free.html)... it has different velocities and volumes and if I use the sound font... well... you won't be able to tell the difference because it'll sound like a real person - as long as all the hits aren't the same and maybe a few are like 1 or 2 ms off. Regardless of my rambling... I too am having trouble getting it to load in Acid 4, in Acid 5 it works great... and in Sound Forge 8. Maybe I should get the latest update for Acid 4... or read the manual some more. I don't know why it's not reading it... it's in the correct folder.
 
So you are having the same problem I am. Then does anybody know of some freeware or shareware that I could get so that I could just replace the bass drum, export a wav, and then open it into acid?
 
grn said:
well if you use the free VST plugin or drumagog, you need only record a sound... and set the threshold correctly and then it will replace it. and that free drum kit sample was sweet. btw, Tim Brown, your theory, has already been done before... http://www.smartelectronix.com/~koen/KTDrumTrigger/ - not that difficult, but I like to use real drums in addition to the samples and triggers.
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Where does it say they were using a Drum trigger? From what I read, he used a cheap microphone.
 
You can use ddrum triggers to record and then insert Drumagog. It works very well. You should make sure that the drums don't ring very much, that will cause mis-triggers. (no matter what you are using for sounds) I have also put 57s in the kick actually touching the head and used them to trigger the kicks. If you know you are going to replace the sounds, you can take care to minimize bleed, ringing, etc...
 
So basically deaden the crap out fo them then... I'll guess i'll have to have a play, as i want to use the subkick to get some low end with the triggerd sample. And if the drum sounds crap then that mic will be useless. But it does work, so i guess i'll be buying some drum triggers.

But i can only get Drumagog Pro, it's a lot more. Should i wait until the Basic version is avaiable? or would i want to get the pro version anyway?
 
You don't have to deaden them, justy make sure they don't ring very much. You really don't want a ringy kick drum anyway, so that won't be a big problem. Toms are what you really have to watch out for, you cant let them ring uncontrolabley.
 
A couple of things I'd like to add:

If you're concerned about the trigger spike not working (though I'm pretty sure it will) you could just take a cheap mic, wrap it in a blanket or pillow, and put it inside the kick as someone else mentioned. That should eliminate false triggering from the snare/hat. Toms that are mounted on the bass drum might still cause problems, you'd have to experiment. My guess is that with gating it won't be a problem.

Secondly, I've done a bunch of drum programming for scratch tracks and stuff, and my favorite kick sample ever is the wav that comes with a shareware program called leafdrums. I use it mostly for metal, and it is the one thing that I'm always happy with. It might not work well for other genres, but I'll bet Drummerdude666 will like it at least. :) Also, try mixing it with the kick from the nature kit that was posted earlier to get the perfect mix of click and natural drum sound.

What would be real cool is if you could figure a way to use a trigger and one of these plugins live to trigger a cheap drum machine. No point in buying a module with 600 samples if you're only using one of them for the kick. It could probably be done, and any suggestions would be welcome.
 
complexprocess said:
A couple of things I'd like to add:
What would be real cool is if you could figure a way to use a trigger and one of these plugins live to trigger a cheap drum machine. No point in buying a module with 600 samples if you're only using one of them for the kick. It could probably be done, and any suggestions would be welcome.
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I was told it can be done.

You use a Roland TMC6, it is a 6-channel Trigger to MIDI converter.

Then whatever the fastest PC/Laptop thatis currently available, with the RAM maxed out. It should be able to handle it with no problem.

The key is find software that doesn't have to process afterwards? (i.e., some software can't process in Real Time.)


Tim
 
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I had some spare time and an old Pintech trigger that was attached to my brother's drums when he got them (I thought it was broken, but figured "what the hell")

Anyway, I tried recording the direct audio spikes from the trigger and converting it with Drumagog. It worked 100%. Here's a brief explanation of what I did and the results:

I duct taped the trigger to the beater head of the bass drum (very ghetto.) I would suggest finding a nicer looking way to attach it. It would have worked fine on the other side as well, I'm sure.

I used an old version of this trigger:
http://www.musiciansfriend.com/srs7/g=home/search/detail/base_pid/444893/
so you can do this for under $20 now (minus the cost of drumagog.)

I used a 1/4" instrument cable to go directly into my recording hardware. Make sure to keep your input levels low, no sense in damaging the inputs. I checked my levels and began to record.

This trigger is a bit microphonic. If you listen closely to the raw track you can hear the other drums that I hit, but the nasty sounding signal the kick is much louder. Mind you, I'm no drummer, so I just played simply. The pattern is kick kick kick (mid tom) kick kick kick (floor tom) kick kick kick (snare).
here is the raw track, amplified to bring up its overall level and with no other processing:


Next I loaded the resulting mono track in a freeware multitracker that supports vst plugins called kristal audio engine. (Actually before I did that I amplified the raw track a little so it would be easier to work with, but didn't gate it or anything else.) I loaded drumagog as an effect for the channel and just hit play. With the default settings it worked perfectly. Well, it played as a snare until I changed it to a kick, but you know... The direct recorded track was too quiet to track properly without some tweaking, but the amplified track that I used as my "raw" source (remember, no other processing) worked like a dream. The software had no trouble distinguishing between the kick and the other quiet but clearly audible drums.

Finally, I exported a stereo mixdown so you could hear the result. This uses the Ludwig sample that Fairview posted (Thanks Fairview)
Here is the result:


In conclusion, it works perfectly. For a very small investment in hardware and the price of the drumagog software (free if you only need it for one project more if you want it for ever) you can get great sounding kick drums. It probably works fine on snare as well, and maybe later I'll experiment with toms. It doesn't take any time to learn or implement. I got it right on the first try, and I'm no engineer. Everyone anyone that has a track to devote to the kick drum should try this.

If I have time later I'll try to get it to work the same with the free plugins that people have posted.

Finally, I did try hitting the kick with varying force to test for dynamics, using Fairview's gog file. Drumagog seemed to handle dynamics fine for those that are looking for it. If you don't want dynamics, just compress your track severely and tweak to make sure no other noises trigger drumagog.

PS - sorry for the novel. I hope people found it informative.

Edit:
DrumTrig (http://www.stormrecordingstudio.co.uk/VST.htm) also works. This one is free, and uses any wav sample. It doesn't allow for dynamics like drumagog does, which is probably good if you're a sloppy drummer. :) Be sure to bring the retrigger option down quite a bit. At its default it's too slow even for the slow sample that I posted above.
 
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Guys, thankyou so much, especially complexprocess for spending that time testing it all out. I appriciate it mate. So the triggers can trigger drumagog, and the shareware program! sweet.

Still gotta find some nice samples. haha.
 
Another thing you can do, is EQ the trigger signal.

I run my triggers on the kicks and snare through an Aphex "Tubessence" parametric EQ, and you can use that to completely eliminate everything but the drum with the trigger on it. You can also do this with a cheap graphic EQ, such as one you might have for a home stereo.

I thought it might work because I have recorded Trigger spikes, and used them to trigger from tape on my Tascam DA-38's.

I'm glad to hear it works with Drumagog!


Now, what this means is that people can trigger drumsounds on a PC by using a mixer, a multichannel audio interface, and a set of home-made trigger pads! There's no need to actually have a Trigger-to-MIDI Interface!! :D



Tim
 
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