Recording With Electronic Drums

If you haven’t tried it yet, recording acoustic drums is never easy. To please the very educated ears of music fans (not to mention agents, industry execs and anyone in the position of judging your music) recording drums must be meticulous, involving the fine tuning and muffling of the drums, lots of microphones and their precise placement, a sound-proofed room or a well-baffled area, lots of tracks on the recording mixer, an experienced engineer to pull it all together and then finally, you can lay down the tunes.

With an electronic drum set, you create a drum set that you want to record, you pick the sounds that comprise that set (yes, in just about every electronic drum set out there, you can assemble a new drum set from the on-board sounds, modify or edit those sounds and store that set for your own very individual use), you mix the individual drum levels and stereo positioning and finally, you send your drum set to the recording mixer via two outputs (or one for mono, if tracks are really limited!). Some of the higher-end drum set modules even have additional, assignable outputs if you want to further “treat” or modify any of your drum sounds.

In other words, you are able to design your own drum set, do your own engineering and deliver a recording-ready performance, easily brought into the recording and mixing process. It won’t take long to get good at it, either, and learning these skills will take you a long way toward being a true professional.

If you are already a professional drummer, then you know that saving time, money and aggravation in the recording studio has to be one of our main objectives. Taking charge of what we bring to the performance also brings us closer to the heart of the creative process. Inventiveness, variety, originality and efficiency are all great traits to possess and these are precisely the traits that electronic drum sets greatly help us to acquire.