The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I've been fighting with Reason to get realistic drums for a long time now, as I live in an apartment and an acoustic kit is not at all practical. I'm considering getting an electronic kit, and wondering if anyone here has some experience to shed light on the matter.
Will it be a decent recording solution?
I've looked at mostly Yamaha and Roland, and read a lot of reviews about them sounding synthy. I definitely don't want a $3000 808.

I use a Roland TD-3 to drive a separate drum VSTi, which, IMO, is a much cheaper, more flexible solution. As for sound quality, it sounds like this, so you can be the judge. The cons: I live in an apartment too, and the pounding on the kick is still loud enough to piss off my neighbor. He is a jerk, though.

I definitely have had some bad experiences with V-drums, but some good ones as well. I say - the most important thing you can do is to get a set that feels like a real set - a fake hi hat that opens and closes is a really important thing ... if you get a set that just has a pad for the hi-hat, and doesn't open a close, there's no way you can work on any sort of finesse. Fake cymbals that at least move at least a bit and don't stay completely stationary are a good choice. Make sure it has at least one setting that sounds real. You don't really need a million real drum settings. A set with tons of great real effects will be in too high a price range. Keep this in mind - as a musician who is primarily a drummer, the only Vdrum/electric drum set that I've actually enjoyed was $10 000+.

Damn, I love your stuff! I haven't heard that one before, and it's now the 4th Puce song with a permanent home on my ipod. Anyway, I regress

That's a method I hadn't thought of. I can get some pretty good kits in Reason using the NN-XT, but I hate programming the beat. What do you do, hook your drum module up via usb as the midi control surface?
I suppose this means you can program which trigger plays which note then, which would make life a hell of a lot easier and cheaper.

Got a hybrid kit (Alesis D4 module, assorted triggers of varying vintages [shut up, Albatross], acoustic cymbals and other such toys) and the brain-module is really important. You want one that can handle dual trigger inputs from the triggers (example: hitting a cymbal trigger in different places like the bell or edge will trigger different sounds).

The Alesis doesn't do that. PM Albatross if he doesn't chime in here, he's got a fairly kickin' set.

Also, mesh heads instead of rubber or hard plastic will give you more/better stick response, especially if you're not a drummer to begin with.

If you're going for real realism, cobble together a real set, some mute pads for the heads & cymbals, and stalk your neighbors to learn their schedules, so you can play out when they're not home.

I bought a <A HREF="http://www.stoffelshome.de/alt_controll ... pg">Roland vclub kit</A> a few years back for the same reason ($1200). I'm not a drummer, but a friend who drums some says it is great. A cooworker got his son a bigger kit td12 I think ( to deal with the neighbor issue) with the mechanical highhat pedal and all mesh heads ( $3000) the kid is a great drummer and seems to love it.

Down side = is the mix possiblities are limited. you get stereo out so you cant do all the fancy sidechaining/compressing/EQing of each drum. You can adjust the EQ and balance of the drums on the kits brain, but the it gets recorded to the DAW as 2 channels only. Another problem is if you have both rubber and mesh heads, the mesh gets dirty rubber marks on it from the sticks.

upside = drumming is hella fun, it's like screwing around on a guitar combined with juggling. And roland gives you an angry japenese woman as a metronome choice - <A HREF="http://home.onemain.com/~jamest/data/Audio%202_01.R.wav"> i think I love her </A>

That's the funniest thing I've ever heard!! I'm going to have that woman count my next entry in. As for kits, yeah, I was looking at the TD 12 and the TD 20 by Roland. I've been pretty happy with every Roland product I've bought so far. So far the TD 12 looks like the best bet, as I probably wouldn't make any use of the TD 20's extra features. It would be nice if they gave it some sampling capabilities, though, so you could set specific hi hat hits to play within certain velocity ranges. Then there really would be no limit to the upgradeability.
Strange noises aside, the drum sounds are not too shabby.

Puce wrote:the pounding on the kick is still loud enough to piss off my neighbor.

Back before I sold my electronic kit I had a wad of cloth taped to the kick pad. Cut down on the noise quite a bit and the trigger worked exactly the same. Surprisingly enough I even have a photograph online!

bzl wrote:

Puce wrote:the pounding on the kick is still loud enough to piss off my neighbor.

Back before I sold my electronic kit I had a wad of cloth taped to the kick pad. Cut down on the noise quite a bit and the trigger worked exactly the same. Surprisingly enough I even have a photograph online!

I did almost the exact same thing on my old Elect kick. But I used a piece of sound deadening foam on the whole pad and just trimmed down the spot the beater hit. Then I did some pieces around the peddle moving part so that they didn't bind or get in the way, and it was almost undetectable when the door is closed. bzl's pad looks much better than mine did. Mine was effective, but ugly, lol.

Puce wrote:I use a Roland TD-3 to drive a separate drum VSTi, which, IMO, is a much cheaper, more flexible solution. As for sound quality, it sounds like this, so you can be the judge. The cons: I live in an apartment too, and the pounding on the kick is still loud enough to piss off my neighbor. He is a jerk, though.

Puce, I was going to ask you how you did your drums. This answers most of my questions. Just to clarify, what percentage of your drum parts are performed live by you on your electronic kit? 100%? 100% plus some post production editing of the recorded MIDI? Or is it a mix of performed and programmed? Also, where'd you get your electronic kit, and how much was it, if you don't mind me asking? And ditto for DFH?

Lunkhead wrote:Puce, I was going to ask you how you did your drums. This answers most of my questions. Just to clarify, what percentage of your drum parts are performed live by you on your electronic kit? 100%? 100% plus some post production editing of the recorded MIDI? Or is it a mix of performed and programmed? Also, where'd you get your electronic kit, and how much was it, if you don't mind me asking? And ditto for DFH?

I typically jam along to the song, then I find my best takes and loop them. I flesh this out by recording some fills, and dropping them in where appropriate. These days I find myself re-sequencing the kick fairly often, partly because of my neighbor, but mostly because I am a NOT a drummer. Also, overdubbing cymbal hits. Because it's all being recorded as midi data, I can't help but fuss around with it in the editor. Mostly I mute stray hits and use a midi-compressor to even out the velocity data a bit. I got the kit a year ago at the local musics shop, and it cost me a cool grand. As for DFH, I take the fifth.

just wanted to chime in, I have the Reason Drum Kits Refill and it sounds really good. I agree that programming them is no fun though. Has anyone here used an electronic kit to control Reason? Aside from micing real drums, that seems like a pretty good option

That's good to know, as I'd been considering buying that ReFill. It's relatively cheap ($129 suggested retail) and the demos sound as good as the demos for more expensive options. I'm already using Reason anyway, so it seemed like a no brainer, except I hadn't heard anything from anyone about it first hand.

I'm also curious if any of you folks have opinions about MIDI input for drums that's somewhere between cheap-o basic keyboard and an electronic kit. Does having a keyboard with weighted keys, or some other input device with more sensitive keys/pads, make a difference when trying to record MIDI drums that way? I'm not sure I'm ready to commit the money and space for an electronic drum kit and the time to actually learn how to play it. A nicer keyboard, though, for example, would just be a replacement of something I already have, and there wouldn't be any learning curve, and it would make playing keys more enjoyable.

EDIT: OK, for $100 + $4 shipping, I decided to just buy the Reason Drum Kits 2.0 ReFill. It seemed too cheap to pass up, and maybe it will come in handy soon if we survive to the next round of Nur Ein II...

Cool, let me know how it sounds. I'm playing around with DFH right now, and really liking the sounds, but the FREAKING sampler they use licks balls! I would drop it in a second if I could get these samples into the NN-XT.

signboy wrote:but the FREAKING sampler they use licks balls!

What don't you like about it?

Lunkhead wrote:I'm also curious if any of you folks have opinions about MIDI input for drums that's somewhere between cheap-o basic keyboard and an electronic kit.

You might already know this, but I've been doing keyboard-based drumming for quite a while; nearly all CowEx songs have this. And I mean nearly single-pass stuff, not layered or step entry where you play kick + hi-hat, then snare, then crash, etc.

If you're looking to do keyboard drumming, I'd recommend using a non-weighted keyboard that is touch-sensitive. The weighting tends to get in the way of faster lines like 32nd notes, drum rolls and other fast fills. You'll need the touch sensitivity (velocity controllers) to avoid sounding like a robot, but that's about it.

So just about any cheapish MIDI keyboard ought to do the trick. Just make sure the keys are wide enough for your fingers. For example, I've been using a Yamaha DJX Keyboard lately, which was ~$100 on eBay in great condition. It's good for laughs, plus a ribbon controller.

Sample-wise, I used to use Blue Jay and Yamaha drums by Sonic Implants (now SoniVox).

More recently I've been using Kontakt 2 and Natural Studio's NSKit. "Get A Stupid Answer" uses the free version quite a bit, and a few samples that came with Kontakt 2.

Since then I've been using the full NSKit 7, which is well worth the price (which you can hear on most of my FAWM 2007 entries, and the Nur Ein stuff). It's got a lot of fancypants features that I haven't even tried yet. For example, apparently I can use the Mod controller to control how open/closed the hi hat is.

So anyway, they're not real drums, but I enjoy them.

Thanks for the info, Plat. That's good to know since it means the keyboard I have is probably good enough. (It's just my playing/programming that probably isn't. )

I just got the Reason Drum Kits ReFill in the mail today and am starting to play around with it. It sounds good, so hopefully I'll be able to make good use of it.

On a side note, I have to say that I am totally not into what I can only assume is the current "modern" snare drum sound, judging from how all the demo kits are set up. They've got the snare compressed to the point where it must be like a square wave or something. It sounds like a totally lifeless 0db phwap to me, but maybe my ears are not sophisticated enough to appreciate it or something...?

EDIT: Dang, I think I need to upgrade my CPU to use this.

Puce wrote:

signboy wrote:but the FREAKING sampler they use licks balls!

What don't you like about it?

I thought about that for a minute, and what I don't like is that the Kompakt sample player feels really non intuitive to me. Or maybe I'm just a technologically inept potlicker. I find it very confusing the way things are grouped. Is there a way to see which velocity range a sample is assigned to? And is there a way to make the foot hat stop the freaking open hat? I even tried drawing the drawing the open hats in with specific not off times, and then cutting the release envelope right off, but the open hats just play on in all their non closing glory. For the record, I did try putting the open & foot hats in a group, and setting the group polyphony to one. It didn't work. I'm gonna go back to Reason. Thanks for the suggestion, though, DFH does have some really good sounds in it.