Recording Roland drums with real cymbals ....

[Dr. Tweedbucket]

I had this idea for a while and tried it out yesterday. I'm pleasantly surprised, it sounds pretty good on tape.

I just used a couple of overheads for the cymbals and edited the snare, kick and toms to my liking, then recorded it all together. Even punching in and out worked well.

The only bad thing is the kit mix is in stereo, so the levels have to be just perfect because there is no editing at mixing time. I ended up disconnecting the kick and then laying that down as a separate track so I had more control over the volume and EQ at mixdown time.

The real cymbals really make it sound authentic. Maybe this wouldn't work on a high level, but it's for fun home recording. My mic'd acoustic kit songs never sounded this good... (small room).

[Chase743]

I've done the same thing many times, using various combinations of mics for the cymbals (e.g. two overheads, hat, ride, etc.).

My favorite is this:

I use the Roland kit to trigger a sample library (I like Superior Drummer) via MIDI, including the crash cymbals (which sound fantastic in SD 2.0, imo). Then I use a real hi-hat and a real ride cymbal with two mics (most drummers I know hate the electronic hat and rides, since they are both played with a lot of "feel.")

Tracking is nice and quiet this way, and I get great results. If I need to quantized, I can do so very easily with the MIDI files, and with only two tracks of cymbals, I can just bang that out in Beat Detective . And since the ride and hat are miced separately, I can just delete the audio from whichever cymbal isn't being played (since drummers don't play both of them at the same time).

[AJBoy238]

Originally Posted by Dr. Tweedbucket

I had this idea for a while and tried it out yesterday. I'm pleasantly surprised, it sounds pretty good on tape.

I just used a couple of overheads for the cymbals and edited the snare, kick and toms to my liking, then recorded it all together. Even punching in and out worked well.

The only bad thing is the kit mix is in stereo, so the levels have to be just perfect because there is no editing at mixing time. I ended up disconnecting the kick and then laying that down as a separate track so I had more control over the volume and EQ at mixdown time.

The real cymbals really make it sound authentic. Maybe this wouldn't work on a high level, but it's for fun home recording. My mic'd acoustic kit songs never sounded this good... (small room).

Have some clips?

[MrTAteMyBalls]

Some of those roland units have 2 groups of stereo outputs that you can configure however you want.

Group 1L: snare
Group 1R: kick

Group 2L: rack tom
Group 2R: floor tom


Running it that way with mic'd cymbals could give even better results.

[Chase743]

www.stolenalibi.com

I think your question was addressed to Tweed, but I'm always up for some shameless self-promotion. The first two songs in the audio player on the right side of the page use the exact method I described above. I'd consider myself an average engineer at best, so don't mind the mixes.