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Recording an electronic drum kit...


Jamesemt
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I'm planning on recording a few songs with my current band as a bit of a show piece to get work.

Our drummer has just bought a Yamaha DTxplorer digital kit, which has midi out. My control interface has midi in, so do I just connect the two? How's MIDI work? Will I get every part of the kit on different tracks or do I have to muck about with the number settings for the MIDI?

If this is potentially very complicated, can someone point me towards a relevant website?

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Hi mate,

I think the MIDI functionality would be useful for triggering things in a VST but not much use for recording the drums. Best bet is to take a line out from the drum brain, a stereo one, and stick that in yer' recording device.

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[quote name='ped' post='237593' date='Jul 11 2008, 08:43 PM']Hi mate,

I think the MIDI functionality would be useful for triggering things in a VST but not much use for recording the drums. Best bet is to take a line out from the drum brain, a stereo one, and stick that in yer' recording device.[/quote]

Cheers for that, I feared as much! How accurate am I likely to be balancing the volumes of the kit? As obviously once it's recorded, I can't turn the hi-hat volume down etc

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I am not sure about the Yamaha kit but on the Roland one you can do all of that on the drum brain beforehand but the cheaper ones you can't adjust the levels. Doing it in the programme will be impossible but if you set each drum pad to trigger a midi sound of the corresponding drum sound you could do it then but not worth the hassle in my opinion. We have recorded a few times with Roland electric kits and they always sound superb, really easy to get an incredible sound. Everything is panned and set.

Cheers
ped

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If you record the MIDI from the DTX to a MIDI track, you're not recording the actual sound, of course, just the "instructions". They'd end up in the same MIDI track, but that's not necessarily a problem, because different note numbers refer to different drum sounds. You can fix mistakes & timing if required.

What you do with it after that is up to you: add a little "swing", use a VST drum plugin to produce sound, or even send the MIDI back out to the DTX "brain" & record the results. if you split the MIDI track by note, you can do things like record and treat the Snare separately.

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