Originally Posted By: jazzmammal
I don't know guys, I'll say the same thing I did at that time.

RD's are AUDIO recordings of a real drummer on a real drum kit in a real studio. You know all the shows and pics you've seen of recording studios or concerts? The drum set might have 10 mics all around it but no matter how good you are as an engineer you are still recording the whole drum kit. You can get some half decent isolation between mics but it's not going to be good enough to use one of those drums in a completely different track.

The snare is sitting right next to the hi hat for example. There's is no way you can get a perfectly isolated snare recording without some hi hat bleeding through. There will be bleed though from the kick drum to the snare to the overheads picking up the cymbals etc, etc. Yeah, the cymbals. How the heck to you get audio recordings of cymbals when the drummer is playing the whole kit?

We're not talking midi drums here and I think you guys still don't understand what the Real Drums are. You're confusing midi drums using a sampler like Jamstix or BFD with a real kit sitting in a real studio.

Just to be clear, this is what I'm talking about:

http://www.politusic.com/music/recording-tips/record-drums/3/

Somebody please 'splain to me how you get isolated individual parts of a drum kit recordings out of this?

Bob

The beginning of the article you reference describes the whole process for recording a drum kit. It explains exactly how to isolate each individual drum sound, starting with the Kick drum.
http://www.politusic.com/music/recording-tips/record-drums/

All those Microphones located all over the drum set, have a specific purpose. They are for sending an individual drum signal to the board. The proximity effect alone, allows this to happen. If you place a microphone 1 inch from the bottom of the snare drum, and another 1 inch from the top of the snare drum, you get 2 sounds almost 90 percent isolated from each other. The floor tom microphone is 99% isolated from the Hi-Hat microphone because they are usually 3 feet from each other. The proper GAIN settings on the microphones and the near field properties of drum mics increase the proximity effect. Sticking a Kick drum microphone on the Kick Drum skin, using a low pass filter setting that blocks the frequencies above 80HZ - 85hz allows for almost total KD isolation.

Its totally possible to isolate the Kick from the snare using the proper microphones, even in a live setting. Its even quite simple to separate the snare from the hi-hat. with the proper microphones, as they are creating sound in almost completely different frequency ranges. They do this isolation live and they do this in the studio.

Also, today a drummer can be playing a standard drum set miced, and be triggering samples of the same drum prerecorded in a studio. That trigger data can also be translated to MIDI data, and include both velocity, and release info. The resulting dual track output from the live mic and the sample can be blended at the sound board FOH or in the studio. These 2 signals are sent to different channels and can be recorded on different tracks. The Live drum microphone sound mixed with sampled/trigger sample are 2 full dynamic audio signals, and can easily produce individual drum sound for each drum, and cymbal.

The notion that you cannot separate individual drums into individual channels/tacks during a live or recording session is just not true. Studio engineers work hard to get this accomplished, so in later stages of production they can raise and lower, EQ, Pan, add different effects to the individual Drum parts.

Last edited by dga; 04/16/16 06:08 AM.
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