Recording E-Drums – Myths, Black Holes, and Real-izing

One thing I’ve grown increasingly interested in over the years is recording using electronic drums. There still seems to be a bit of a taboo about recording with this type of instrument.  I’ve asked many engineers their opinions on it and skepticism seems to be the common response.  Among some of the common myths about electronic drum recording:

Editing:  

Editing an acoustic kit takes a great deal of work and skill.  You can’t just move a drum hit on an individual track, you need to move all of the audio tracks associated with the drum recording because each mic has bleed from the next drum over.  If you were to move an out-of-time tom hit to be in time, you’d still have the ghost hits of the tom in the overheads, and surrounding mics.  Not good.  Not to mention the phase problems you would encounter if you did this.

So, what’s the solution?  Usually at the end of a recording session, the engineer will hit the record button, walk out to the drum kit, and hit each of the drums at varying degrees of power.  He’ll also combine drum hits together, such as kick + snare, snare + hat, kick + cymbal, etc.  The purpose of this is to sample the drum kit so that he can take these sampled hits and replace individual miss-played hits within the song.  The main investment for this is time.  The skill of drum editing can be learned quite easily, but the process (especially when editing a sloppy drummer) is a black hole of post-production time.

Drum editing is likely the main cause of psychedelic drug-abuse in the studio.

The biggest advantage of e-drums is the ability to record MIDI.  If you have a set of e-drums, please for the love of polly pocket, don’t record the audio outs.  Even if you have multiple lines outs for each drum, you simply won’t have the control and flexibility of using MIDI.  Why is midi better when it comes to recording e-drums?  First of all, midi actually doesn’t have any audio information.

It simply note and control information and triggers prerecorded sounds, samples, or controls synthesizers.  What this means for drum recording is you can take individual midi notes and move them all you want without worrying about the overlap of audio because the audio is actually generated on the fly while you play back your session.

You also have the added advantage of quantization which automatically retimes your performance so that it is aligned perfectly (or more accurately) to your time signature and tempo gird.  Editing is a chore no matter which way you look at it, but I can tell you that editing is a lot more efficient and easier to do with an electronic drum kit if you approach it the same way that you would an acoustic kit.  The problem is, editing for electronic drums isn’t always just about compensating for errors on the drummer’s part, it’s also about making something fake sound real.  -Just like everything in the music industry (har, har).

Real-izing: making midi sound real

If you simply set up your electronic drum kit, record the midi into your sequencer, throw a sample library on top of it, and mix like normal, you’ll be doing what most people do, and I can almost guarantee you’ll get a robotic drum sound. Real-izing an electronic drum kit is about finessing and coaxing out a realistic sound.  As it stands, the technology that exists today for electronic drum kits and sample libraries is not at the level where we can just “plug & play”.  In part 2 of this blog series, I’ll go over some specific editing and real-izing techniques for your e-drum recordings.