Triggering drums with other drums

[Adam P]

As I mentioned before in the "Recording Screaming" thread, I'm going to be recording some friends in a few weeks. I'd like to use two mics on the snare, one on top and one doing the "LDC close to the floor" approach that I've read about here. I like that the bottom snare mic adds a lot to the sound with the way it picks up the sound of the snares quite well.

I plan to use two mics on the kick drum as well, and because the LDC by the floor picks up quite a bit of kick itself, I'd prefer to gate it out if possible. The guys I'm recording have a Behringer Composer Pro MDX2200 dual-channel compressor with a noise gate. I'd like to use the side channel of the compressor to trigger the bottom snare mic's signal, using the top mic as the trigger source. I know that the Behringer is not the highest quality piece of gear, but I'm a believer in working with what you've got to the best of its potential. I'm not sure how to go about hooking this up to trigger, however. I think that I should run the signal out from the top snare's preamp into the sidechain input on the compressor, and then run the sidechain output to my Layla input. I would then run the preamp output for the bottom snare mic into the compressor's primary input, and run the compressor's output into another input on the Layla. I would then adjust the gate until it was letting through the proper amount of signal.

Can anyone tell me if this would be the right way to hook this up? If not, how should I go about doing this?

Thanks.

Edit: If I wanted to bus the two snare tracks to a single track, would I want to run the Snare top's insert I/O into the sidechain I/O on the compressor, and the Snare bottom's insert I/O into the primary I/O on the compressor?

 

[TexRoadkill]

Sidechains don't usually have an output. Normally you would feed a sidechain with an Aux or buss send from the mixer. Just hook the compressors to the inserts and use the buss for your mixed snare track.

 

[Adam P]

Ok. I looked at the image of the unit's rear panel (like I said, it belongs to the band, not me, and they're 4 hours away). You're right, the sidechain has a send/return, not an I/O, presumably for an EQ or something similar. So what you're suggesting is to run the compressor through the insert of the bottom mic's channel and trigger it with an aux send from the top mic's channel? The product documentation says to run into the sidechain return to use it as a trigger. Thanks for the input.

 

[TexRoadkill]

So what you're suggesting is to run the compressor through the insert of the bottom mic's channel and trigger it with an aux send from the top mic's channel?

Yep, that should do the trick. It also gives you level control of the sidechain send with the Aux knob.

 

[Adam P]

Awesome, thanks a lot.

 

[Adam P]

Sorry to dig this up from the dead, but I was thinking about it on my drive home from work tonight.

Rather than trigger the bottom snare mic using the signal from the top snare mic, what about triggering it using an actual drum trigger? Obviously its possible, and it would seem logical because it would be much easier to make sure that you were getting strictly the attack of the snare, and not bleed from the other drums. What I'm wondering is if your standard drum trigger (like a DDrum, etc) that terminates in a 1/4" plug can be brought up in level using a standard mic preamp. I would like to think it could, since a trigger is (to the best of my knowledge, at least) a simple transducer. However, as far as I know, they don't have an internal preamp like a mic does (maybe they don't need one because the signal is hotter? I don't know). Obviously, the actual sound wouldn't matter as long as the initial attack was there. The output from the trigger's preamp would be fed to the gate's sidechain, and the rest would be done as I talked about before.

I don't know that I would ever even attempt this, but my curiosity gets the best of me. Any thoughts?

 

[Tim Brown]

You don't need to pre amp the trigger. Plug it in, it will work.

I do this with my dbx166a on the kick and snare.
I have a Behringer quad Gate, and i was pissed when i got it out of the box, and it didn't have an external Key! ARGH! Man, that pissed me off. Because I like to trigger the gates with a drum trigger, because it's much more accurate.



Plus, you are triggering using the actual drumstrike and not "air borne"(sp) signals.(i.e., sounds in the room, where other things can open the gate.)
You could also plug the trigger into an EQ, and then plug the EQ into the Key input, so that you could modify the trigger's frequency range with the EQ. (I do this as well with a DOD Graphic EQ)



Tim