processor for drums

[thedude400]

newbie here and I am starting to get into recording drums well. I have what I as far as a decent mic and interface setup.(2 oktava overheads, audio technica, sm57 all through a behrenger eurorack mixer and then into an aardvark 8channel interface ) I will be upgrading to some tom mics and hi hat mic soon enough but this has worked decent for now.

I'm looking at processors right now so I can record the drums live with effects on them. I want to be able to add some reverb, compression, gating to the drums. For example I wanna put some compression and hall on the snare, compression and room on the overheads, compression and gate on the bass drum and hear this through isolation headphones live and record through my interface.

Is this possible and more importantly, can it be done well without spending an arm and a leg? I want 24-bit and I have been eying the lexicon MPX1 and the MPX 550 used on ebay. What should I look for in the price range of 200-400 dollars new or used that could satisfy what I want to accomplish? Am I going to have to spend alot more money to do this than I thought And could someone give me a quick rundown of how all of this might work?

And later on down the road when I have up to 8 mics, will I be able to individually control the effects of all 8 mics? What all will I need?

Any advice would be helpful. I'm pretty new to micing drums and using processors and effects.

 

[NationalSandwic]

i don't know anything about prices, i'm afraid.

why are you going to compress the snare & kick? overheads, i understand. gate is good on snare as well.

you want to control these effects live? on 8 mics? that's one hell of a setup.
i'm assuming you're the drummer and you want to be playing, but can i ask what hands you're going to use to do this live effects control?

the only thing that occurs to me is to recommend trying Abelton Live. it's a piece of sofware (and i think it's fantastic) that will allow you to run 8 channels live and apply realtime effects, but you're going to need a mighty powerful PC and a pro sound card with enough inputs, and the effects (obviously all plugins) that come with the program are not so hot.

have you thought about using an electronic kit?

 

[thedude400]

re: drum processor

simpler put, I want to use real-time effects on acoustic drums. I want to be able to run my snare and over head mics through some seperate channels of compression, gating, and reverb effects, put on some isolation headphones and record knowing that exactly what I'm hearing in my phones is exactly what will be recorded on my program. Let's ditch the idea of doing this with 8 mics and stick with just the overheads and snare mic.

Oh and I should have worded it differently but when I said I want to control these drums live, I just meant in realtime and acoustically as opposed to electronic or midi controlled. I have no need or desire to do do something like this in a live band situation.

Can this be done simply by sending the effects to my mixer? How many seperate channels of effects can I run into my mixer using a simple effects processor such as the MPX 550? Or will I be looking at needing other units to do this well?

 

[Farview]

OK,
1. If you add reverb on the way into the computer, you can't get it back off if you over-did it. (and you will)
2. You will need one channel of compression for each mic if you want to keep each mic going to a separate track.
3. You will need a mixer to send more than one mic signal to an effects unit and 2 more inputs on the interface to catch the reverb output. (assuming you want it separate.
4 you will need 1 channel of gate for every mic you want to gate. Gating on the way in is very dangerous, if you set the gate too loose, it's useless, if you set it too tight, you lose the quiet stuff.

Your best bet would be to record everything dry on separate tracks and use plugins to get the sound you want. If you really need the reverb to get the 'feel' of what you are doing...get over it. Most professionals don't even have the drums in thier headphones when they record, just the click and the scratch track.