tips for electronic drums

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foreverain4

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i just started mixing a project that the band insisted on using electronic drums. roland v drums to be exact. these things sound so incredibly stale and lifeless in the mix. do you guys know of any tricks to make them sound any better? it is pretty nice to have every drum on a separate track with absolutely no bleed at all. maybe this is part of the problem. any ideas?
 
maybe you can post this in the drum forum.

well, I think one of the key factors is the samples. If you have the typical Roland samples, well, I think they suck. Personally I think if you are using the electronic drums to imitate life drums... well, that doesn't work in my point of view.:) M

Do you use compression? what reverb settings do you use?
 
i have heard that you are supposed to keep them as unprocessed as possible. i did throw some Waves reverb on them. they still just sound plastic. i also tried some compression, but they dont seem to have quite the impact that real drums do. i thought about reamping them. sending them out to some speakers and micing the cabinet. never tried this with drums before, but it might do wonders to get a little air behind them.
 
my only advice is: if you can't use different samples with them, don't use them anymore. Ok, it does sound very extreme, but when your samples suck, your sound will suck, no matter what you do with them.
 
funny thing is, i told them they would turn out like this, but it ends up being my fault anyway. i need to post a sign that says "no edrums allowed". :D
 
Like its been said before, if the patch sucks, it sucks.

However.....We have a set of the Roland V-drums at our church that I record almost weekly and there is one patch our drummers like that sounds like a really great acoustic set mixed for a hard rock style when it sits in a mix (by itself it sounds almost real). I've played mixes for drummers who didnt know what was used and they thought it sounded great (and all I had to do was mix a stereo feed!!).

Darryl.....
 
Re Amping

I have a friend with a really high end studio that has an in house set of the V-Drums.
The easiest way (for him) to make the sound real was to re amp.
Port the drum mix only through some decent speakers at a pretty healthy level and record the room. If you don't pump the volume a little it will still sound fake.
 
Sending electronic drums into a room (via speakers) and then micing adding the room sound to the samples has been a key "tip" for recording electronic drums since the first macines came out.

Recording the V-Drums - if the module is a TD-10 - you can dial in "modeled room ambiance" from the drum brain and assign that to any or all of the outputs - this helps to add some life (realism) to the sounds.
 
my only tip for roland v drums.

record the midi (cause the samples suck) then remap the midi to better samples like dfh or sonic implants.
 
First,make sure you are recording at proper levels for the drums.
Just because we have the best in modern technology is no excuse for not keeping your eye on the gains.Even compression/limiting won't help if your signal isn't hot enough.

Try a different drum module if the above doesn't work...
 
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