Drum Recording - Electronic Kit and Real Cymbals

I remembering hearing in a SOS podcast of an interesting way to record drums - use an electronic kit for everything but the cymbals, then use a good set of cymbals and mic those up with some OHs. They said this is great for people who don't have access to a good room - so you would filter out most of the low end of the OHs (which contains a lot of the room sound but not too much of the cymbal sound) and then put the entire kit in an artificial room. It would also be great for people who are limited to only two mic inputs and MIDI. It would thus allow (hopefully) very realistic and great sounding drums with pretty minimal gear (provided you had a good sample library).

I have not tried this yet, but I plan to. I have a friend with all the drum requirements and I can supply the rest. Just wondering if anyone has tried this or knows of any good articles (I found it a bit difficult to google this specifically) or just any opinions in general. If I had the room, mics and gear, I would always prefer a fully live kit, but at the moment, it ain't possible for me!

Oh that's annoying. Does this mean it makes monitoring difficult? Do you hear this delay? Does simply shifting the MIDI part back 14ms give you what you need? I'd love if you could post a sample of your results when you finish testing (with or without other instruments). Please keep us updated on your progress!

If the delay is that long, something would seem to be technically wrong. I currently use a ZenDrum, which uses actually original MIDI, not MIDI over USB, so it should be about as slow as it's likely to get. I don't see delays like that.

I would think that MIDI actually should require far less latency (to store the data) than audio since it's very small and requires no conversion. If you monitor through the DAW of course you then have to have the MIDI trigger the sounds and hear them back out, which adds to the latency. But just to store the data should be really fast, as long as the e-drum brain isn't just waiting too long to send it or something.

In my case I am also monitoring through the DAW as well, since I use BFD, and I don't have any significant delay that would bother me. How are you getting the MIDI into the DAW? Even real drums involve two or three milliseconds for the sound to travel to the drummer's ears. So four to six milliseconds isn't going to make any difference. For MIDI the conversion latency (for monitoring through the DAW) would only be one way, as it comes back out for listening, since there's no audio going in.
 
If anything you would think that the live cymbals would end up being behind the drums since they have to be converted to be stored, and therefore get the ingoing conversion latency, whereas the MIDI doesn't.
 

I remember listening to that PodCast and thinking it was a good idea too.

Can't say that I've tried it but I do sometimes augment my hihat lines with a real tambourine. I find it gives a looser feel to the drums and somehow makes them more real (I use SD2 for the rest).