Questions about recording and mixing electronic drums

[haarp]

Hi there guys. This is a totally unrelated topic to the one I've started early and I would personally like to thank Alvin for helping me out.

Firstly, I'm using a Yamaha DTXpress IV special kit and the Alesis IO2 Audio interface.

So I'm recording directly from the drums to the laptop through it's Audio out ports.

However, I'm always getting fuzz noises coming out although the gain is at its minimum. (P.S I'm using Cubase Le5)
At the same time, I'm not sure if it's latency problem or error from me but there seems to be quite a huge delay when ever I record. Could it be that the computer specifications is too low or that there is not enough power to record everything at a go?

Second issue I have is about mixing them. From what I've read online about mixing drums, its mostly on individual instruments. However, I'm not using MIDI to record my drums, hence all the instruments are on 1 track. How would I mix it from here and what can I do to improve the sound quality and such.

Putting everything together, I need to know how to record my drums on time (reduce latency) and how I can mix them for better sounds.

Any help would be gladly appreciated.

Thanks, Eric

 

[edrummer]

Hi, firstly i would want to ask for the purpose of your recording , are you trying to record your drums like the way the studio does, recording it individually to mix the drums into a new piece of composed music, or are you trying to record drum covers? And the fuzz noises, which i suspect it is feedback , might be caused when you are trying to record it directly to the laptop with 2 mono out to a 3.5 mm stereo port, and the quality of the cable and the adaptor affects the signal quality! If u are using 2 or 1 1/4 jacks to one 3.5mm, chances are, the computer would not be able to take it because the signal strength of a 1/4 cable is far too strong compared to a 3.5mm,
And i am curious about the ram, cache, Harddisk space of your com, i would recommend 4 - 8 gb for the computer for it to run the application smoothly,
i tried recording thru a lousy audio interface with 2 gb ram in the past in my com, the drums sounded like peanut butter.. And if your instruments are all on one track, the it is not easy to adjust every single instrument from just one track, or in fact, very difficult, I can recommend you a simply way, which is linking everything to a mixer, prefably u can buy those yamaha mixers with pre mics, and then you can link every single instrument into 1 mixer, And then record to a $400 zoom multi track recorder sold at city music, CHeers, just my 2 cents here

 

[blueprintstudios]

haarp : hi there, I happen to stumble onto the drums section. I'm surprised you didn't post this under the sound section of soft cos you're missing out hehe.

Fuzz noises : will most likely be either coming from poor grounding of your house/room, or the "sound module" of the yamaha, or the preamps gain levels on your alesis IO2. if you're recording via audio outputs. make sure you first set your yamaha sound module volume to about 70% safely, then increase the preamp levels on your alesis audio interface.

Latency : unless you're using a pentium 3 or a computer that's poorly maintained. make sure your asio drivers are updated to the latest version. if not try www.asio4all.com

Mixing : lets talk about recording first since that's the source. there're 2 ways to record your e-drums. one via Audio = using the sound of your yamaha sound module. or via Midi, recording your "playing" as >> midi >> into cubase >> triggering off a software sound module like ezdrummer , if not you can google free ones [highlight]here[/highlight].

Audio = already combined "snarekickcymbalstoms.wav"
Midi = individual hit/etc you could totally fix up any mess up in your recording, including adjusting the strength of hit. (velocity) via keyboard and mouse.

you won't be able to fix much apart from compression/eq/reverb on a stereo track. because it's all embedded in the .wav "forever".

 

[blueprintstudios]

example :
this is a DI guitar + DI Bass into my Zoom R16 and the roland hd-1 Vdrums > m-audio midisport > USB > into my computer then triggering off a vst drum sound module