Best/cheapest way to play midi drums in?

Let me put it this way: I'm making drums for my solo-production for live gigs. I could live with programmed drums, but I have about 30 songs so it would take forever to make'em all sound "natural". Plus I need to make them in a week. I don't have any vRoland drums etc, only real drums. I have also Analogue Drums-samples, I'm gonna use those, at least with toms/snare/kick. I'm thinking of playing real drums in with a little kit, using: OH Snare Tom Kick This way I get a live sound from HH and Crash/Ride and I'd trigger everything else. I'm NOT a drummer, so I need to use grid and quantize snare/kick. I hope I made myself clear with this, a bit hard to describe it precisely. Anyway, how would you do it?

I would play the drums from the keyboard, then finetune them later in the MIDI editor.

toontrack drum tracker. converts tracked drums to midi. it can be a shitty recording too

I've done exactly this and I'm no drummer either : ) I recorded the drums only with a stereo OH but if you have the mics and the inputs to close mic the snare, kick and tom that will make the process easier. First I split the recorded drums on every hit (I only split at snare, kick and tom hits - that usually does it - but if you want it really tight you could split at every hihat, ride and so on as well). Secondly I quantized those items to the grid, giving me a much tighter beat (says a bit about my drumming capabilities : ) Play around with the overlap settings to make it sound as good as possible. Then I duplicated the OH track and moved each snare hit to its own track, each kick to its own etc (this you of course do not have to do if you close mic the drums). So now I have one track with the (quantized) OH one with the snare hits, one with the kick and one with the tom (I only used one tom). The only thing left to do is insert DrumReaplacer on every track (except the OH) and use that to create a fake close miced snare, kick and tom. What I really like about this way of doing it is that I get a real OH which in the style of music I do is invaluable. Programmed drums can sound great in some genres but in some I couldn't do without real drums (well real OH's, at least : ) I'm at work now so I can't post an example but if you'd like to I'll do that when I get home tonight. Regards, - Jonas

You can close mic the kick, snare, toms and replace them with samples in Reaper. If you don't feel comfortable playing the kit yourself, maybe there is someone you know who can play it for you? If you found a decent drummer you wouldn't have to futz with quantizing and all that. Plus, it would go a lot faster. 30 song in a week is a pretty tall order.

For a more natural way to get the drum notes into your software, look into getting a used Yamaha dd-55. I recently did exactly that after trying the Korg nanopad and realizing that wasn't doing it for me. Just got one on eBay for $75. They have 7 pads and you can program them to work well with midi in Reaper for use with your samples. Good luck!

I'm using the dd-55 as well. I'm not a drummer and I edit a lot of notes later anyway but it works quite nicely. Plus you can gig with it if you wanted later on if you want to trigger drum sounds or loops live. It's not the sturdiest one but I've seen it on stage before.

Here's a rough mix (no fx on the individual tracks, I just slapped a comp and some eq on the drum bus): It's recorded using a two mics in a recorderman setup and the I sliced and replaced as described above. the samples used are Pipeline's Grip samples. Do post any stuff when you're done! Regards, - Jonas

for that finger/hand drumming kind of thing - (just the one 'drum', but could be more) I just attach a clip on guitar tuner sensor, which is just a piezo, to whatever surface is to be the drum . I run that audio straight into reaper then use ktdrumtrigger to convert to midi and onto whatever sound module i wish - works a treat, great velocity response once setup (as a track template) ... i converted a large easter egg tin into a hand drum - its a nice half way point from annoying keyboard input before getting to full-on edrum (which i have, but take a while to setup) with just two, you can lay down a kick/snare pattern first, then layer in hats and cymbals after - handy for non-drummers, but give you that 'played in' realism and velocity response, which is where programmed in or keyboard input drums suffer i think. thought it worth a mention

That's a good idea. Do you have a link to where you can buy these clips?