EQ+compression on an electronic drum kit mix

M

Michael Roper

Freshman
Sep 13, 2012
27
0
1
Perth, Australia
Hi guys - I'm looking for some tips to get the best sound out of an electronic drum kit that I can only get a stereo mix from.
The kit is a Roland TD-15 unit, which only has L/R outputs (as opposed to the more expensive TD-30, which has 8 individual outs).

Can anyone suggest a good approach to EQing and compressing an overall mix of drums, how to punch up the kick, etc?
 
Re: EQ+compression on an electronic drum kit mix

Silas Pradetto said:
Give the drummer a legit drum fill and tell him to make it sound good. If he is good, he will.

Sent from my DROID RAZR
Click to expand...

+1 :thumbup:
My experience is that the e-drums invariably get set with too little gain, so the drummer has to bash them to get any sound and is unable to play (or at least attempt to) with any dynamics. Sometimes a soft knee limiter can be helpful if the drummer plays full tilt despite having lots of monitor.
 
Re: EQ+compression on an electronic drum kit mix

There are tons of parameters to adjust that affects the way the processor detects the hits from the sticks.

Adjusting those will have a great impact on the generated sound!

If this is for live situation then pan i.e. Kick and snare left and the rest of the kit right. Then you can process each 'channel' to taste.

If this is a recording then use toontrack or similar for outstanding quality by using the midi out of the processor.

Otherwise you can use the midi track and by panning the processor you'd get two sources per multi-pass. Four multi-passes will give you eight instrument tracks. I'd record it as dry as possible to process it in the daw.
 
Re: EQ+compression on an electronic drum kit mix

This may not work. I ran into this problem just the other week.

The drummer at his house has 4 15" speakers just for his fill and the kick sounds great with that he says.

On the tiny stage we were working on, I gave him a d+b max 15 and there wasn't enough bottom end for him. I also didn't have enough bottom end in my B2's, or in my headphones. I tried pointing this out and suggesting he change sound.

Even if I did give him a whopping drum fill with all the bottom end he needs, that won't fix my FOH problem.

andrew
 
Re: EQ+compression on an electronic drum kit mix

Thanks for your input guys, it helped a lot...

Our drummer is only young, and still getting the feel of the electronic kit, so i don't think he's exactly sure how it should sound either - i think it's going to be a case of setting up one night, and just playing around until we're both happy with the sound.

Robert, your tip of hard panning certain parts of the kit to different channels is a great idea, i will definitely give that one a shot!

Cheers guys...
 
Top Bottom