Is there a way to do a survey of how folks do drums?

It seems there are a lot of great ways to get drum tracks in. (I started by buying a DR880)
Once you choose any quality method, there is a lot of work to do learning it.
It seems unlikely anyone could take the time to learn several of them.
So do most folks just randomly choose one method and ignore the others?

How did you choose?

In my opinion, the best way to do a poll is to just ask.

Official "polls" usually don't offer enough selections for people to just give you a conversational answer of how they like to do it.  The answers probably won't fit into a cookie cutter poll form.  I know mine won't.  :D

You better sit down, cause you're gonna fall down laughing if you don't ...

After over a decade of trying to get my drums to sound real, the most realistic drums I ever recorded ... were with a set of Rock Band plastic drums. I played along with a click track and did my own thing.

It taught me that it's better to do what comes natural, rather than to 'adapt' to an unnatural point and click method of doing something that you really need to feel and has a rhythm.

Now, I'm sure I could go out and spend a few grand on a nice midi set of drums, but I just can't justify that. These 4 little pads and a faux kick work just fine for getting the actual 'feel' of playing.

There are free drivers out there, and it works latency free with Sonar using Session Drummer, and SI Drums, and the 'drums' can be had for $20 bucks at your local pawn shop since the whole Rock Band craze has died ... You can even get cymbals for them ...

Yeah, I have to go in and do some velocity adjustments after the fact, but nothing IMO compares to actually playing a beat. Heck, I've even tapped a beat in to a mic and used Audio Snap to convert it to midi and brought it in to Session Drummer.

Any time you can do a live beat, it's going to sound better IMO.

But I played out live for many years and I'm used to playing with imperfect humans ... it takes some getting used to play with perfectly timed drums done in Step Sequencer ... imo.

If you don't have access to real drums, the next best thing is to use E-drums. You can use E-drums even if you aren't a drummer but have enough rhythm to get it done by playing things separately and do overdubs, it is probably the easiest way to get just what you want to hear. You can keep it simple, and then edit the resulting midi file - say by playing closed high-hat, and then editing in some open high-hats to make it interesting. You can create drums for verse, chorus, bridge etc. by playing a few bars of each, quantizing and looping the sections you want to keep. Play fills and cymbals separately, later, when the song is completely written and arranged, and drop them in to replace the loop where appropriate. Any sort of velocity sensitive trigger pad(s) will do the trick, or even a midi keyboard.

I do all of my drum tracks using BFD2

I used to roll them all my own, from scratch, one hit at a time, adjusting velocity/timing as I went.

Extremely laborious & time consuming.

Now, I choose a set of stock grooves from BFD's palette and manually tweak these to get the feel I want and I've gotten some great (to my ears) results from doing it this way.

Wow!  What a loaded question!  I dare say there are as many ways to "do drums" as there are recordists.
I think it really depends on what you want your drums to "do" in any given track.  I myself "do drums" differently on nearly every song I write for some reason...maybe I'm still experimenting.  But I will do anything from using a great drum module such as EZ Drummer, Cakewalk's Session Drummer, or Addictive Drums along with the beats/grooves that come with them, to using NI Battery with either a drum pad or my MIDI keyboard and just "beat" a groove in, or sort through the millions of drum beat sample loops that are available to drop in and keep the pulse of my tune.  And of course, there is always the option to mic up a set of real drums and have at it or plug in a set of MIDI drums and let a real drummer play (not me...lol).

And don't forget about "layering" these different methods too, as I have found some VERY interesting sounds and patterns created by combining a loop with an EZ Drummer beat for instance, or maybe laying some additional beats with Battery on top of a drum loop.  More often than not, I will usually utilize some sort of combination of these methods.

So for me, it really depends on the song, the feel, and the emotion I want to coax out of the tune.  In fact, a lot of times it's the drum groove that inspires the whole rest of the tune for me!

Good luck and happy drumming!

Can't play drums to save my life. I have good rythmn in my hands but not legs and feet.
for me it Superior Drummer 2 and choose from the thousands of MIDI clips that come with it. They've been played by real drummers who have the chops I don't.

Mind you I have spent most of my time recording others so I've had to do a bit of drum replacement to fix live drumming.

I am a drummer , so I play mine in live using a Roland TD6KV triggering Steven Slate Drums 4.0.

The beauty of this method for me is I can adjust any inaccuracy using the PRV after the effect whilst still maintaining the feel I intended. Of course if the kit sound is wrong I just change the kits as needs be.

My only drawback is with my hardware the TD6, it lacks the hihat feel and response I would ideally want from the real thing.  Sadly I don't have the cash to splash out in one of the higher end eKits that caters for enhanced hi hat response..... One day :-).

My place won't allow me to mic and record my acoustic kits, so the eKit is the way ahead.

I generally record with rudimentary sequenced drum parts, entered using Native Instruments Battery 3, which is a superb drum synth, and then try to have a real drummer come back in to do cymbals - and sometimes fills, as needed.

Sometimes, I just go with the Battery 3 cymbals, as they are quite good.  Many times I will have a drummer input using an electronic set, and will then adjust sounds and such as needed - this preserves the most realistic feel possible, while still allowing full control over stereo placement, levels, and effects of each individual drum/cymbal.

I do create custom kits with the exact set of drums and individual drum samples that I want, for a particular sound for each song, and then I create a Sonar drum map for that exact combination.

In my custom kits I also assign outputs to different channels - Battery 3 has 16 stereo outputs, for a total of 32 outputs, which allows an AMAZING level of control in mixing - each drum and cymbal can have its own effects, leveling, and panning.

The bottom line is that are a zillion ways to record drums, and what you choose depends on:

1.  Choice
2.  Ability
3.  Available sounds
4.  Available instrumentation

In my opinion, 

Bob Bone

I have a 7pc Accoustic drum kit, Then I have some cheap Accoustic drums with Mesh heads (pretty much silent) and dual roland triggers and 3 TMC-6's. Gigastudio days I was triggering Larry seyer drums, nowadays I'm triggering NI studio drummer or abbey roads drummer series) I'm a pianist AND a drummer, so I prefer to play it down live on my Homeade e-drums. Also, Own Maschine which I use for techno, hip hop, pop. Hey Bub, I've actually used a rock band midi gtr to play chords on a sample patch. :)

I create my own drum parts from scratch in PRV, mainly using NI Battery 3.  I normally start with a Battery kit (plus drum map) that I have used before and modify it to suit.

I never use pre-existing drum patterns, grooves or loops.  I don't understand how it would ever be possible to find the right pattern from the billions of possibilities anyway.

My reply was to congalocke....

congalocke


Anybody willing to post examples of some of their best work using their methods?

all of the music on my website/link to MY MUSIC on sound click.....is either Jamstix.... mostly the older stuff or Band in a Box drums ...similar to JS in that the program creates the tracks....BB is used on most of my more current tunes. 

Someone had asked about tunes with drumming examples above.

Here is a link to a still RAW version of a cover I recorded.  The tune is a progressive rock tune from back in the 70's, UK - In the Dead of Night.

I have just the midi tracks down - no mixing whatsoever, and still need to add guitar and vocals.  But it DOES have sequenced drums, with the exception of about 6 measures the ENTIRE piece has different drumming in each and every measure.

It will give you somewhat of an idea of what you can do with sequenced drums.  I use Native Instrument's Battery 3 for this.  I set up a separate output for each drum/cymbal.  Battery 3 has 32 outputs, setup in 16 sets of stereo outs.  In sonar, I created a drum map for my custom kit, and set it up to have a separate track for each set of outputs, so every drum and cymbal has its own audio track in Sonar.  This will allow complete control when I get ready to mix.

Anyways, here is a quick and dirty YouTube movie with some random photos thrown in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AP2PIiSDsUw

Bob Bone

I suck at programing so I play them live using a Yamaha electric kit and record only the MIDI data.  I use that to drive Steven Slate 4 samples.  This gives me the option to quantize, edit, move, delete, etc. any notes needed.