How to Record With Drum Triggers

Drum triggers allow a drummer to "trigger" alternative drum sounds while playing a standard drum kit. By using drum triggers during a recording session, the real acoustic drum sounds can be replaced with electronic or sampled drum sounds while still capturing the feel of a live drum performance. This opens up endless creative possibilities throughout the recording process, as the performer is no longer limited by the available drum tones that are produced by the acoustic instrument itself.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Acoustic drum kit
• Drum triggers
• Sound module
• Recording equipment and software
• MIDI cables

1. Attach drum triggers to each drum. Most drum triggers attach easily with a clamping mechanism.

2. Plug the output of each drum trigger into the input of a sound module. The trigger will send important information to the sound module regarding the drummer's performance, such as velocity and volume levels.

3. Choose a tone from the available tone bank on the sound module. This tone will be the sound that will replace the acoustic drum tone.

4. Connect the MIDI output of the sound module to an available MIDI input of your recording equipment using standard MIDI cables.

5. Press record in your recording software and play the acoustic drums. The performance will be captured by the drum triggers. It will then be sent to the sound module. The sound module will send the performance data to the recording equipment where it will finally be saved by the recording software. All of this will happen in real-time as the drummer plays.

6. Listen to the recording. You can now hear the recording played with the new drum tones.

7. Change the drum sounds. This is the best part about using drum triggers. Now that the original performance has been recorded, the drum sounds used can by changed an unlimited amount of times throughout the rest of the recording process, providing a level of flexibility that would be impossible using only standard acoustic drums.

Tips & Warnings

• You can use the "quantize" function available in your recording software in order to fix timing issues that may have occurred during the drummer's performance after the fact. Most recording software has at least a basic quantize function.

Resources

• Roland Drum Triggers