For Die Humpin!, Super Galactic Space Banana, and Boneslinky! (coming soon) the Flute Squad exclusively used samples for every drum track. I know it’s hard to believe, but when we first started out we too were young, dumb, and actually owned a regular ole drum kit. We managed to get some decent recorded sounds out of it, but when we switched to an electronic drum kit for our live shows (to reduce stage volume and setup time), Captain Mediocrity famously used a flaming chainsaw to cut the acoustic drum kit in half during our set on Showtime at the Apollo (we were never asked back.)
The post-real-drums-era was born and now we only record the MIDI data for our drums tracks. A Roland TD-6v kit is used, and we lay down basic live tracks with drums, guitar, bass, and scratch vocals to create an energetic foundation for the song. The MIDI data from the drums can then be assigned to any sample set available; it could even be used to play a piano!
The advantages to recording with an electronic kit are two-fold:
- Each part of the kit (snare, bass, cymbals, etc) can be edited separately on a note-by-note basis for volume and timing. So if you flub a few hits here and there in an otherwise perfect take, fixing the mistakes is as simple and deleting or moving the faulty MIDI notes in your software.
- Each part of the kit can be switched out with a different drum in the mixing process. So if you decide after adding in 20 layers of guitars that the snare sound is no longer cutting through the mix, you can just choose a different snare from your sample set that sits better. This is way better than the traditional method of adding tons of EQ and compression.
When Die Humpin! was being recorded there weren’t a lot of affordable VSTi (virtual instrument) drum kits available. Now, three years later, there are a whole bunch of great ones in the $50-$200 range. So you can literally have hundreds of different drums to choose from when assembling your virtual drum kit, for less than half the cost of a moderately decent acoustic kit.
After so much praise and hate-mail that came from our Your Big Amp Is Annoying series (seriously, read the comments) we decided to write a little bit about how we use our gear in non-live situations. In upcoming posts of Electronic Drums in the Studio we’ll review various drum VSTi’s such as Steven Slate EX and Toontrack’s Superior Drummer, and will also give you some tips on how to get the best results from an e-drum setup.