Quote:
Originally Posted by Fazor
I've seen that, and I've seen sets they call electric which appear to be acoustic drums fitted with "triggers" that let you drumm electronically, but trigger hammers to hit the drum head (It's been really really busy today, that's just what the pics looked like).
One of my customers that has a band happened to come in today, and so I asked him. He suggested these triggers but I really didn't get to talk to him about it before someone else came in. But if that's how these triggers work, then it doesn't help the "I need it to be semi-quiet" aspect.
Though, I suppose maybe I have the idea backwards, and triggers really just mute the drum but signal the electric "virtual" drum to produce a sound. Hmm...
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Yes, you do have it backwards. Triggers are usually piezoelectric transducers (basically contact mics) which produce a signal when the drum is struck. This signal is then used to "trigger" the playing of a sampled drum sound. The amplitude of the trigger signal can control the loudness of the sample playback or in some cases can be mapped onto another control parameter to allow for more freedom of expression.
If you want playing to be as quiet as if you were playing on practice pads, you'll have to muffle the drums yourself, as trigger sensors don't usually muffle them heavily. Stuffing the drum with rags works pretty well for this.
What they do is to allow a player who has a normal kit also to use electronic drum sounds without having figure out how to fit a bunch of drum pads into that kit.
There have also been electronic drum "brains" which could accept audio from miced conventional drums as a trigger signal. Getting this to work reliably, without missed beats and false or double triggering, can be pretty difficult- back in the late '90s when I was doing a lot of recording the only one I encountered that worked well enough to replace conventionally recorded drums was the Forat F16, and accomplishing
that took quite a bit of parameter-tweaking.
As for sound, modern drum brains usually have a library of sampled sounds available. These are often quite well-recorded and could easily fool the casual listener into thinking they're hearing an acoustic drum performance.
The
big giveaway- the "machine-gun" sound produced on rolls by the repetitive retriggering of the
same sample seems to have been alleviated in the newer generations of drum brain. Unfortunately, no similar improvements have been made in
drummer's brains (I'm an old sound man- drummers are my natural enemy).