by Nick Sterling.

Nick Sterling

I can imagine that as guitar players, the drum world is probably a pretty confusing thing; I know it was for me. There are so many obstacles to overcome in the tracking of real acoustic drums. First you need a fantastic drummer. Then you need to have all of the expensive recording microphones and a talented engineer who knows how and where to place all of those mics. Finally, you need the room to track in. Needless to say, the task of recording drums is a very time and budget consuming task!

When I was working on my second record at home with my ProTools 002 rig (I've now upgraded to HD), I was tracking all of my demo songs playing my Yamaha DTXpress II electronic kit. This was ok to get the ideas across, but the sound, sorry to say, was just not even close to cutting it. We all know what electronic drums sound like in rock music, especially the lower end models like mine.

I had planned to track all of the guitar, bass and vocal tracks in my home studio for the final recordings of the songs and had an awesome drummer lined out to play the drums on the record. I had the studio time booked for him as well. Soon enough, after the very beginning of the project I got to wondering if this was really what I wanted.

Sure, the aspect of tracking the drums live in a great room with a killer drummer sounded great, but there were downsides to the idea as well. The drums for the album were to be cut in three days. Once they were done there would be no going back. No changing of tempos, no alterations to the structure of the songs (without a lot of heavy editing) and no overall flexibility to the actual tone of the drums to the song.

The cost was huge, taking up by far the largest portion of the funding I had created for the record. About the time we were ready to do the tracking and post-preproduction, I started to learn about a fairly new product called BFD drums. That’s when my whole outlook on drums in my home studio changed.

I had already known how to play drums to a decent level on my DTXpress kit. But I had no way to make them sound any better. Sure, I went in and tweaked and tweaked, but when it all comes down to it, they were just not up to the level of the project I was working on. BFD drums is a plug-in made by FXpansion. It is an expansive drum workstation with everything to choose from in its options. It has many different kick drum, snare, tom, and cymbal samples, and even includes adjustable room, PZM, and overhead mics. Now I just needed a way to get my playing from my DTXpress into the sounds in BFD.

When I finally figured out how to do it, I realized it was actually very simple. The basic idea is; DTXpress into Midi cable into USB into BFD software. I then could play all of my drums live on the electronic kit with the great sound from BFD. I was super happy with this and ended up using these sounds all over my record Life Goes On.

The best part about doing your drums this way is the ability to go back and alter what you played. Because all of your drum triggers are being recorded to a midi track and then routed to BFD, you can go back and add more groove or quantization, change structures of songs and even program in different fills. Now that I’ve gotten very used to editing the midi tracks, sometimes, if I’m in a hurry, I will just program the drums out, something that even non-drummers could learn to do.

Since I have been using BFD I started using their “All Outputs” feature which allows you to route all of the individual kit pieces and mics into separate auxiliary or audio tracks. This is great for mixing as it gives you a huge amount of flexibility.

Recently I found out about another new company changing the face of the drum recording world. Steven Slate Drums. What they are doing is releasing sample libraries of some of the most awesome sounding live drums you will ever hear. I use Drumagog on my individual BFD tracks to load the Steven Slate samples into my sessions. Drumagog is a sound replacing plug-in which takes the input of your original drum track and replaces it with the new triggered sample from Steven Slate or any other set of samples. This is great because I can use his awesome kicks, snares, and toms, but still keep my cymbals and room mics from BFD active.

Well, I hope that I have shed some light on the idea of recording legitimate drums in your home studio. Technology has come a very long way and it really sounds fantastic! Honestly, I believe that most of the big time producers today are using at least a few samples on their drum tracks as well.

All in all, it’s a very long, time consuming process to do the drums this way, but in the end the finished product is awesome.

Nick

Related Links
FXPansion
Steven Slate Drums
Drumagog