Live cymbals with sampled drums.

[_ Six _]

I can't record a full kit at home for obvious reasons but I could probably get away with snare, kick and toms triggered from BFD and then mic up my cymbals with an overhead for a more realistic drum track.

What I'm concerned about is the cymbals sitting in the mix correctly.

Has anyone had any success with that approach? I was thinking about treating the cymbals as a separate entity and tying the whole kit together with a decent convolution reverb?

Any tips on Mic placement etc?

[jacknicmusic]

If you've got BFD and succumbed to sampling the drums, just go the full hog and use the overheads and the cymbals in BFD... the samples were done in Air studios with some pretty nifty gear - most people won't be able to recreate that at home. Plus you're going to get into all kinds of issues making the cymbals "fit", and even if you get the sound right you'll be essentially mixing with 2 separate sets of overheads - one for BFD and one for your cymbals. This could get really tricky.

If you want a laugh, listen to Bryan Adams' album 'Waking up the Neighbours' - OK it is early 90's but they used the approach you mentioned... sampled drums but real cymbals... Obviously now even home studio results would be far better than what they managed to come up with but it still demonstrates what it could sound like if all goes wrong...

My advice, just give into BFD!

[_ Six _]

Easier said than done without an electric kit. I play drums so tapping out hits on a keyboard frustrates me.

I want to be able to get nice articulations and a groove going. I've never been able to do that in BFD.

Maybe a new controller is in order or I just have to piss the neighbours off!

[ParlourSound]

IMO you just can't beat real drums but BFD is really pretty good if you can't record real drums.

[fHumble fHingaz]

Hi, I'm a brand-new poster here - I was just browsing & I saw the title of your thread & thought "this is exactly the thing that I've been working on over the past few weeks"! so I thought I'd chime in... I have a very humble garage-type project studio where I do have a kit set up permanently, but unfortunately I'm a guitarist & my drumming skills are somewhat limited. Since my usual drummer not available at present, & in view of the fact that I can create a reasonable (I feel) sounding drum track with Addictive Drums, I decided to experiment with the very approach you mentioned. This is what I did: I used only my two Behringer small-diaphragm condenser microphones as overheads above the kit in an x-y configuration. My studio is a small room (aprox 4.5 x 6m) with some acoustic treatment. Once I had composed my drum track, I played the cymbals along to it section by section, recording the hi-hat & ride to one stereo track & the crashes to another. I tried to get the timing as tight as I could to the midi drums. I also recorded various cymbal hits as "fixer samples" I could use later. Now the fun part: the editing -
I edited the cymbals to get them to match the timing of the midi drums exactly... Since I use Sonar 7 Producer Edition, I used the "audiosnap" time-stretching/splicing tools extensively to match my playing up with the midi cymbals. Because my playing was reasonably tight, this was not as radical as it sounds, but it really helped to intergrate the two parts. When it came time to mix the drum tracks, I just used my ears & tried to process them using similar reverb/convolution/compression/saturation settings to the room settings on Addictive drums. As you can see, this was a lot of work, but it was less work than painstakingly editing my own poor drum kit playing. - Was it worth it? Well, to me, midi-drums with multi-samples are sounding better than ever now, but the thing that always stands out is their poor reproduction of the innumerable fine nuances of cymbal playing. So, in a word, yes, I feel that this approach was worth it to get that back. Hope this is helpful...

[_ Six _]

Cheers fHumble fHingaz,

Welcome to the forum.

My problem is I CAN play drums but just not at the house! ha

So you used cymbals from AD, recorded additional cymbals and then mixed them together? I was thinking more along the lines of only using drum hit samples (Snare kick and toms) and then recording all of the cymbals live over that.

I'm gonna give it a try and see what happens. I know BFD has some amazing sounds, but like you said, you want the intricacies of live cymbal playing rather than triggered samples. It's the ride that kills me the most...

I've heard that you can integrate external audio into BFD (not sure about AD?) so that you can make use of the room sound as a kind of convolution reverb?

I'd be interested if anyone knows?

[fHumble fHingaz]

Cheers fHumble fHingaz,

So you used cymbals from AD, recorded additional cymbals and then mixed them together? I was thinking more along the lines of only using drum hit samples (Snare kick and toms) and then recording all of the cymbals live over that.

Thanks SixStringzzz - No, I actually just played along to the midi cymbals to get the timing tight, but then muted them - so the only cymbals being heard were the "live" ones. No, you can't actually send your own stuff to the effects channels in AD, (this would be a great feature, though) I just looked at the size of the room that what was being used in AD & used the convolution reverb in Sonar (Voxengo's Perfect Space)to create a space as close as possible to it for the cymbals.

[Wease]

i have done what your currently trying out (and I know some others have as well on the forum, who are world class drummers) and I've also always had an issue with electronic cymbals...and especially hi hats!!(which are next to useless on electronic kits IMHO)
So - I set up the electronic kit for kick, snare and toms and set up a real hi hat and cymbals (although sometimes the sampled splash/crash cymbals aren't so bad -rides are especially "difficult" and nasty on electronic drums for my tastes)
i usually record both midi and audio from the electronic drum kit...although if i had BFD i wouldn't use the audio that often...I'd use the audio to give me a guide to timing and groove that can be missed in midi sometimes...and a template i can use to adjust any bad midi timing issues.
I record the "real metal" as i usually would (at the same time as the electronics of course)- using overhead condensers and a small hat mic.

In mixdown I'd take off all effects from the sample drums - give them their own audio channel following a micing pattern (even adding undersnare mics etc) and sometimes print those channels - then eq as normal and bus the drums

for the live audio i'd bleed in some of the electronic drums to mask the thud of stick on rubber pad....eq'ed as i would expect to hear from a recorded acoustic kits overheads (ie more snare in the right overhead than left, the tom volume adjusted for placement in the stereo field accordingly and finally more snare in the hat mic than everything else and eq'ed high with a high level of low pass to emulate a small condensers snare micing sound...with even a bit of reverb to emulate distance). you can go to town on this by feeding sub busses if you so desire...(i'e 3 different (or the amount of real miscs used) sends at different levels for each of the electronic drum sounds - fed to a final overhead 1 and 2 and hat mic channel.

I would then expect to (after a faf) hear a relatively believable performance....

It's not a replacement for real drums in a great room...but then that's not really the issue....and I'm lucky able to record real drums most of the time now - but the volume convenience of electronic drums is and was very useful - and once you start mixing - you can get quite quick at getting a more believable sound.