Electric Drums as input to Protools LE?

[slobizman]

Got a question:

 

My son has a kind of small recording space in our old guest room. We've been thinking about making a larger room-in-a-room personal studio in the garage for a better recording space. But, it's damn expensive. I had a thought. Please tell me if it is worth considering.

 

I know the existing small space (13 x 14 feet) is not great for recording drums. But, what if we had a really good electric drum kit instead of a regular drum kit? Then, the size of the room would not matter. Would it sound as good? Would bands he might track be willing to use it too?

 

We would be inputing this into a Pro Tools DigiDesign 002R system.

[HiRoller]

13'x14' isn't too small for recording drums. You'll probably want to put up some acoustic treatment (permanent or temporary) to deal with the flutter echoes and such.

Acoustic vs. electronic: Totally personal taste, I vote acoustic hands down. I had an e-kit for recording demos on my Digi 001 and sold it for an acoustic kit. E-kits suck at getting a realistic acoustic sound IMHO and the top kits are also ridiculously expensive.

[sidereal]

The simple answer is no, it won't sound as good. The sound of a room adds a great deal of the character to acoustic recordings. Many times it's the overheads that produce the best sound from the kit. Cymbals are of course the big thing that e-drums lack, but it's also that overhead miking captures the kit as well and gives it that natural sound. This is known as ambience, and it's often the forgotten element for beginners in recording kits.

 

While some e-drums have gotten progressively better in terms of quality sound, you still won't get that *sound* unless you mic up an acoustic kit. As an added benefit, if your son has the option of his own space in which to record, doing it acoustically will give him the opportunity to experiment and really learn about signal flow, acoustics, mic placement, etc.

 

I'd recommend treating the room as much as possible, and then getting a few budget mics (sm57s, a kick mic, some decent overheads). The 002R has 4 microphone preamps, you could use these for kick/snare/tom1/tom2. To get good ambience recording, you should look into adding a nicer 2-channel preamp like a Presonus, and route that either analog or digital to the 002 and use that for stereo overhead miking. That would make for a really great recording setup.

 

Before plunking down that cash, though, you might want to look into all of this to see if it's in the right way to go. This is just my opinion. Of course you could route 6 channels from an electronic kit direct and discrete into the 002, but personally, I'm just not keen on recording e-drums. I've done it, it's not very satisfying no matter how good the samples.

 

Hope this helps...

[Jazzman]

Let me say this about small rooms. I had my first studio in my Library in my home. The space was 15ft X 12ft. I had a 32/8 Mackie mixing board in it, two racks of gear flagging both sides of the board, bass player, keyboard and player, a 10 piece Pearl drum set, and four singers while I was in the same room mixing. That was seven people in the same room recording. It was tight, but the recordings were great going to the DA88's. Everyone had headphones on. No drummer that time, just used patterns I came up with.

 

The demo that was made was very cool.

 

Just my .02 cents worth.

 

Jazzman