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Welcome to the first article on the blog. This time we are going to talk about recording professional sounding drums on a small budget.

Drums are one of the hardest instruments to record. Because of the large number of tracks and the high bandwidth of the frequencies involved, and the fact that they provide the foundation of the end production, drums can be a major bitch to get right. To do proper drums in a studio envirionment you need an excellent sounding room and a shitload of quality equipment, not to mention the drumset itself and the player.

However thanks to the technology available today there are some options for recording drums without going to a high end studio. Three methods we will discuss:

1. Recording MIDI on a V-Drum or similar electronics kit and triggering samples
2. Recording acoustic drums in a less then ideal environment and using sample replacement to reinforce the sound
3. Programming the drums entirely

Option 1 is what we have done on the new record and option 2 was the route we went on Allegory, and option 3 is what i’ve done for the ENDITOL album.

So for the new album we are capturing Brett’s performance on the V-Drum kit, all his playing dynamics and parts are captured via MIDI to the computer – in this case the Cubase sequencer, then this MIDI is used to trigger drum sounds from a sample library – in this case Toontrack Superior Drummer 2.0 mixed with Steven Slate Drums.

It worked out quite well I think. Providing you use a quality sample library you are getting the sound of a real recording since the samples are recorded in a live room with full microphone bleed etc. The drum sounds are relatively unprocessed samples so you can mix them however you like, which we will go into more in other posts. Obviously you’ll have to spend some cash on the e-drum kit and the software, but nothing is fucking free is it! Here are some links to get you started:

Toontrack – makers of some killer drum samples, also has links to DYI e-drummer and other cool shit – www.toontrack.com
Slate Drums – another kick ass sample set for Metal sounds – www.stevenslatedrums.com
Andy Sneap Forum – check out the stickies and postings on here, a lot of great fucking people and articles – Sneap Forum
Cubase MIDI for n00bz – Steinberg Users
Drum mixing guide for Metal – Noise 101 Guides