Recording electronic drums in pro tools

The minimum computer requirements for digital audio workstation software are not usually too demanding. These requirements can be satisfied with laptop or desktop computers and for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems as you prefer.

You need to connect your electronic drum module to your computer to record. If you already do some recording of vocals or guitar, you probably already have an audio interface. If you have something like this and it has MIDI input capability, it would make sense to use it. Striking any drum or cymbal should cause the yellow IN light to brighten momentarily in synchronization with the striking. On your computer, launch your DAW software and create a new project.

On Sonar, you create a new project by clicking the Create a New Project button after the software opens. Enter a name for your new project. Accept defaults for location and path. Click OK when done. The Sonar interface will open. This will open the Addictive Drums property page and insert a drum instrument track into Sonar. You will see a big Addictive Drums window pop up. Minimize this window in the normal way for your operating system.

You will see track 1 added to the Sonar track view. Hover over the bottom boundary of the track until you see the cursor change to parallel lines, click and drag the bottom boundary down until you can see all the controls on the track.

If you have a different MIDI interface the name of the adapter to select will likely be different, but should be the only option. Find the minimized Addictive Drums window at the bottom of your computer screen and restore it to view in the normal way for your operating system.

This is where you make sure that each part of your drum kit triggers the corresponding synthesized drum in the software. Strike several drums and cymbals on your kit. In the screenshot, the MIDI note received is If the IN light does not illuminate with each strike on the kit, something is not right with your MIDI connection from the drum module to the computer step 5 or the connection of the MIDI adapter to your instrument track in Sonar step 8.

Review these steps and repeat them carefully to resolve the problem. In the Map Preset section at the top left of the map window:. After loading this map, test everything on your kit to make sure that the part you hit triggers the same part on Addictive Drums. You can see in the map window what is being triggered by the name on the key that lights up on the MIDI keyboard or the name of the sound in the MIDI Monitor section as shown in step If you find anything wrong when checking the map in step 11 e.

To do that:. Select the kit piece you are trying to map in the set of buttons below the preset area. Strike the corresponding piece on your drum set.

The software will map the MIDI note sent from the drum module to the correct drum sound in the software. If you make any manual changes like this, save them by doing the following in the Map Preset section:. When recording, you should know the meter of your song.

It is beyond the scope of this tutorial to teach meter. There is almost zero chance that the default tempo and measure would be what you want. This would make it much more difficult to fix any timing issues with your playing or find any major mistakes where you might have missed part of a measure or happened to play some extra notes beyond a measure boundary.

The DCA synthesis engine is not bad at all and the sounds you can shape with this little monster are excellent for all sorts of dance, funky, abstract, techno and disco tracks. SparkVintage includes emulations of over 30 famous analog hardware drum machines. It has a nice sequencer, a lot of controls and it is cheaper than most other options on the market. Though not a drum machine per se this is the go to tool for countless producers out there.

Addictive Drums 2 comes standard with three excellently recorded drum kits. So no synthesis in this one but the samples are simply awesome. And if you get bored of the three basic kits, the guys from XLN offer a lot of expansion packs so you can further expand your collection. You can tweak any of the presets or build up a custom kit from scratch; it also comes with EQ and a transient shaper; It is an overall great plug-in to have in your toolbox.

Battery is basically a drum sampler which comes loaded with kits oriented towards electronic music production. Each sample in the library is editable, you can stretch it and bend it almost in unrecognizable ways. The best part of Battery is the super fast workflow that you get using the tag based browser which lets you find the right kit or the right sound in minutes. I have to say that this is my favorite one on the list.

The core of Heartbeat consists of the eight instrument channels all tweak-able and rout-able to other effects within Heartbeat or to different tracks in Pro Tools for multitrack mixing. What I love most about his drum machine is its sound creation possibility — you can tweak your head off with this thing. As always, I advise you to take your time with any one drum machine you decide to acquire; learn it so well that you can be truly creative with it.

The options presented here are all powerful drum creation tools that will really enhance your production arsenal. Before going out and buying any of these, however, I suggest you use the native plug-ins until you burn those out as those are also very powerful plug-ins.

If it does, then you can usually plug that right into your computer with no need for an audio interface. Many audio interfaces already have MIDI connections. So before you buy a midi interface, check if you already have one. Once your drums and computer are talking to each other, open a new software Instrument track this may be named differently in your DAW and arm it for recording.

The way this works depends on your gear. Drum samples are the actual sounds you hear when you play the electric drums. The same goes for Logic Pro X. These are the same kits with more advanced controls. Most any DAW will have the ability to load up a sample pack and play them back for you. Stephen Slate Drums Free is another great option for nice modern rock drum sounds.