To drum or not to drum - when we dont have a real drum kit!

[mikeit]

wanna know how you guys handle things in this situation.....i guess its a common one...for most of us....i dont have a drum kit.....but need to buy one...in fact i just dont like what i am doing...but have no chance....

Having a keyboard with drums (voices) on it i use them to make my drum track (in fact they dont sound like real drums...but nowadays who knows what is real....)

How do you solve these situation when not having a drum kit, you use another drum source or what?

 

[guitarplayr82]

I know a lot of producers, especially hip-hop, that do all of their drum tracks on a keyboard. If you get good at it and get some good samples it can sound just as good as live drums. Since I don't have the space for a whole kit in my studio (or the money for the big interface and mics), I use a Yamaha DD-65 mini-electric drum kit. I use samples from it, sample the real kit I have downstairs, and use samples I can find online or in my DAW to piece together MIDI instruments with all the sounds I'm looking for. I then either use my MIDI keyboard or, more primarily, the DD-65 to control and record the MIDI instruments. The DD-65 runs at about $200 and is a great small-scale replacement for the feeling of a real kit.

 

[Rimshot]

wanna know how you guys handle things in this situation.....i guess its a common one...for most of us....i dont have a drum kit.....but need to buy one...in fact i just dont like what i am doing...but have no chance....

Having a keyboard with drums (voices) on it i use them to make my drum track (in fact they dont sound like real drums...but nowadays who knows what is real....)

How do you solve these situation when not having a drum kit, you use another drum source or what?

I suppose it depends on what you're after and how you think about music. If percussion is simply a "timekeeper" and you want something that keeps the beat and sort of sounds like it might be drums, then a synthesized drum track will probably work just fine for you.

If you really like the interaction of different musicians in collaboration on the performance of a piece of music, then you need real drums, and a drummer. Also. if you like the sound of real drums, you can only get it with real drums.

I play some keyboard as well as flutes and a couple of reed instruments. I can pick out a simple bass line on a 4 string bass guitar. I have written a few pieces and played all of the parts. The music is heavy on percussion, but I needed the other instruments. I have these recorded and a few are burned to disc. People like them, I don't. I like the music well enough, but it's one person playing with himself (kind of like masturbation instead of real sex). I am slowly bringing in other musicians to play these parts on their own instruments and I give them (in fact I ask them and want them) to put their own personalities into their tracks. In my opinion, only then can this music come alive. That's my opinion, but a lot of "old school" musicians feel the same way as me. When it is synthesized or multi-tracked by the same musician, most of the time the music feel wrong or robotic, not organic.

If I hear music that is played using a synthesized drum track, I won't listen to it, I turn it off. It feels sadly lacking to my ears. I'm sure that a lot of people feel that way about the electronic voice trickery you can do on a good keyboard. (I love playing with those things and for a while, I even convinced my self that it sounded good in my music............... until I wised up and actually tried listening to it objectively)

I'm sorry to say that to you. It's not meant as a smack down, I'm just being honest.

 

[mikeit]

i really like real instruments....but since i dont have them i have to use other stuff to try to accomplish my ideas....in fact drums i like them a lot and wanna buy one some day...but now i must use the keyboard ones....

 

[tmix]

Another option if you have the time, is to collaborate with a drummer who can record their own drums and send you the tracks.
There are people possibly in your town, or I know of numerous on line clollboration sites where folks do it for free, just for the love of it.
One that I like is www.kompoz.com

 

[moresound]

No real drum kit???

Well, there is always the all purpose suitcase kick drum to start with!!!!!

 

[Captain Ego]

I have used a cheap drum machine in the past because I didn't have the capability to record all the mics on a drum kit. Just program the way you would play it, use the dryest sounds on the machine, and try to use some slight variations on the sounds that occur over and over (I have my pads programmed with a bunch of the same snare, crash, and hi-hat sound all +/- a little bit of pitch, and LOTS of crash variations because those are the biggest givaway). It's cheating, but it sounds as close to the real drums as I could get. Ride the tempo knob a bit too when you play back the full arrangement so it occasionally gets very slightly faster or slower hovering around the real tempo instead of spot on it. Once its mixed in with the rest of the music, preferrably in the background as much as possible, blending it with the same reverb as the rest of the mix helps it sound like its in the same room too, rather than some disembodied sounds out of limbo when everything else sounds like it is in some kind of physical space.