Equipment for Recording Electronic Drums

Series Summary

The drum is probably the oldest musical instrument known to man; yet over thousands of years, its basic design has not changed much. Drums were perhaps first created from the primal idea of mimicking the human heartbeat, yet today percussion music has developed into a technical, complex arrangement of beats and grooves. What has changed are the materials and sound production technology of modern drum kits.

A new school of drum kits hit the market over 30 years ago, forever changing the face of percussion: the electronic drum. With drummers all of a sudden having the flexibility and range of sound of say…a guitar player, they found a new world of sound, new songs and new approaches to playing.

In this free drumming video series, you'll learn tips and techniques on recording with electronic drums. Our expert Steve Blank will show step-by-step, from the click track, scratch vocals, and laying down the first drum track, to building dynamics with background percussion, adding effects like reverb and compression, and mixing your multi-track recordings down to a CD or demo tape.

Video Transcript

"Welcome to Expert Village. I'm Steve Blank audio and video engineer for MindFood Productions. Here to show you how we can record with electronic drums. What equipment do we need? Well here's the electronic drums. There are five drum triggers, four cymbal triggers, high hat that's hooked to a high hat pedal and a bass drum. The controller which has a total of eight audio outputs and one mini output. That one mini output is hooked to this midi controller which is hooked up to this laptop computer. I can find melodies and notes and transfer those notes to the drums and run that all through this laptop which is running midi software for a particular song that we are going to record. A child that's a drummer. The laptop is also hooked up to this sound card and the outputs are running to this other sound card. This sound card is hooked up to this second computer. This computer will be used for recording the audio. The sound card has eight inputs and ten outputs. The sound card with the ten outputs, two of those outputs are being used to run to these two monitors, to studio monitors that will be used to hear what we are playing and what we are mixing. We need a midi chord running from the midi out on the drum controller to the midi in on the keyboard midi controller. I also have a snake hooked up which lets me run as many as eight inputs and outputs. On this computer I'll be doing the video editing as we do the audio recording project. And on this television here I'm using this as a video monitor to make sure that my pictures okay, and that looks okay to me. "