Why I record a hybrid drum kit

My hybrid kit started with the room I have. I live in a townhome with neighbors on the other side of shared walls, and my studio is in the basement.

I’ve put work into reducing how much sound leaves the room. The ceiling has 18 inches of ROCKWOOL Safe’n’Sound insulation, and the walls and ceiling have 5/8-inch drywall with Audimute sheeting behind it. Even with that construction, a fully acoustic drum kit is still too much to control here.

The lower frequencies from the kick and toms can rattle the house framing and carry to the neighbors. My small room also wouldn’t give me the acoustic drum tones I wanted from microphones. I’d likely end up replacing those drums with samples after recording anyway.

Keeping the acoustic part that works

Cymbals are the part samples have never gotten right for me. The wash, the decay, the way a crash and a ride interact, the articulation of a hi-hat. So I play real Zildjians and record them with microphones.

The kick, snare, and toms are captured as MIDI during the same take. MIDI records which drum I played, when, and how hard I hit it. A drum module or software instrument turns that data into sound.

I found that I could manage the cymbals in this studio, and they didn’t cause the same rattling in the house framing as the kick and toms. Inside the room, a rockwool ceiling cloud and wall panels help control reflections around the microphones. Those exposed panels shape what the mics hear; the insulation and layers behind the drywall are part of the separate effort to limit sound leaving the room.

The kit behind the idea

When I first put this setup together, my 1997 DW kit wore mesh heads and Roland triggers. The heads reduced the acoustic drum volume, and an eDRUMin 8 converted the hits into MIDI for software drum instruments such as Addictive Drums 2 and Steven Slate Drums 5.

The cymbal mics still pick up faint stick taps from the mesh heads. The kit is quieter than an acoustic setup, but the cymbals are still loud instruments. This works in my room; it isn’t a silent practice kit.

I wrote about that change in What changed in my studio this fall.

What stays open, and what does not

I can change the kick, snare, and tom sounds after a take without playing the song again. The cymbals are already audio, so their character and the way I played them are decisions I make at the kit.

Changing drum libraries can mean adjusting the MIDI mapping so each note plays the intended drum or articulation. The timing can stay the same, but a different library may respond differently to the strength of each hit. I still have to listen to how the new sounds work with the cymbals.

A fully acoustic kit in a great room has its own sound, and I’m available for those sessions too. The hybrid setup gives me a way to make records in the space I have, with more freedom to choose the drum sounds afterward.

You can mix the example tracks and hear different drum sounds against the same cymbals. Those examples use Addictive Drums 2 sounds driven by my unedited MIDI, with the acoustic cymbals from the same take.