Triggers????

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thenightsalive

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hey i was wondering the advantages and disadvantages to using triggers and also using them with midi sounds like on reason. And do they lower volume the lighter you hit them? any other help you can give would be great.
 
hey i was wondering the advantages and disadvantages to using triggers and also using them with midi sounds like on reason. And do they lower volume the lighter you hit them? any other help you can give would be great.

i just recently got into using triggers and i fell in love. there are thousand of presets on the DM5 that all are amazing. I usually only use it on the kick and if needed the snare. But thats enough to make it sound incredible.

Once you elarn how to you use, you can set the sensitivity so no other durms interfere with it, and so if you slam the drum or tap it it will produce the same output. I highly recomend to pick up like a DM5 and a roland trigger. I got an amazing deal on mine. I spent only 150 and got 2 new tirggers and the dm5 basically new. But i know ebay has them going for like 175 for the unit.

in my opinion there is no real disadvantage. I havent used reason yet with any of my recordings so i cant relate a trigger to that.

i hope i helped
 
I have an Edirol PCR-300 midi controller that I use to "trigger" midi events. It has all kinds of uses for recording. A regular keyboard, of course, to trigger "musical" things like piano, and organ, and bass. It also has "pads" for triggering "non-musical" events like drums. All of the pads are velocity sensitive, so I can control attack and volume. And the controller has sliders and knobs for controlling midi events like synth levels and sliders in the software mixer console.
 
The triggers are just the things that connect to the drums. Any midi features are a part of what ever you plug the triggers in to. The triggers themselves are just transducers, like microphones.

I normally just plug the triggers into my mic preamps and record them as audio. I take that audio track and use it to trigger Drumagog.

You can use a unit like the DM5 and either use the sounds from it or just use it to generate midi data for a sampler like reason.
 
You can use a unit like the DM5 and either use the sounds from it or just use it to generate midi data for a sampler like reason.

I use my DM5 for generating midi data.... plus I use the internal sounds to monitor while tracking, so there is no latency from my recording app.... of course I use pads, not triggers on acoustic drums. In that case, you could "monitor" the sound of the acoustic drum...
 
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You can obviously trigger in-the-box as well, you don't have to use hardware triggers. The sound of samples is great for rock and metal stuff, but use sparingly in funk etc., maybe to get consistency on accents or something.

The best drum sound I've found is using a close-miked kit, triggering kick, toms, and snare accents (which you do by setting a high volume threshold), and mixing it with the live mix.

I sampled single hits of the drums, recorded immediately before the take; this gives a much organic sound IMO than reason or whatever built-in sounds.
 
Any Samples With Recording WITH TRIGGERS?

i would love to hear some different recordings with triggers if anyone can help. also if you do anything different please explain.
 
Farview, are you saying that I could buy some cheapo triggers and stick em on my practice drum kit and then sample through my firepod into cubase with drumagog? That would be sweet for when i don't feel like banging away on a real kit and just want to jam or make 100 mistakes before i finally hit a rythm properly... I am finding that my timing sucks with anything double bass. Practice is the ultimate answer but in the meantime..
 
You just plug the triggers into your firepod, like you would a microphone. Use the audio signal that you record to trigger Drumagog. It's that simple.
 
Very cool.. doesn't help me figure out what i could do for cymbals or hi hats but still really cool.
 
Just use an XY pair for the cymbals.

If you have no cymbals, you could just set up anything with a trigger on it (or even a really cheap radio shack mic with a bunch of foam wrapped around it) and use that signal to trigger Drumagog samples of cymbals.

You just have to make a spikey signal and record it, Drumagog will make the sounds.
 
I thought drumagog didn't have cymbals samples? But you can only go soo far before you run into wanting more like hi hat open and closed and cymbal chokes.. though i suppose if you had enough inputs you could trigger a bunch of diff sounds. I think i am ready to bite the bullet on drumagog 4.0. I can't be bothered anymore tip toeing around my tiny jam room to set everything up. I thought i could struggle through it but it plain sucks.

By the way, when you say XY, do you mean split stereo channel for left and right side?
 
My Rock Drums Volume II collection has a set of cymbals. The hats have 5 positions from closed to open. The ride has 3 different positions, etc...
I tried to figure out how to do cymbal chokes, but a drummer tends to choke the cymbal in time with the song, which I can't predict.


You can also sample your own cymbals the way you like.
 
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