Recording Stereo Drum Tracks

In this post I will describe how I use a very simple method to record Stereo drum tracks from my Roland V-Drums into my laptop. There are many guides available online about how to do this kind of stuff but maybe this will be useful too! I won't go into all the technical terms - Google it.

Recording drums as a stereo track means you can't fiddle about too much with the recording afterwards. The individual drum sounds and velocities need to be set prior to recording. It is fairly easy to re-record individual parts (e.g. a fill that went wrong during the recording, or trying a different feel) using an overdub and clever cutting/pasting. If you want to mess around with quantising and changing the instrument sounds post-recording then it's necessary to use a MIDI recording technique and VSTs.

Gear

The hardware I use is as follows:
- Roland TD-15 V-Drums
- stereo jack cable
- Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Audio Interface (+ USB cable to laptop)
- laptop running Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software

One of my original attempts to record these drums into my laptop consisted of running a stereo cable from the TD-15 into a small mixing desk, and then running a 1/4" jack into my laptop. The recording 'worked' but there were huge latency issues. The Audio Interface solved this problem and is basically one of my most important pieces of gear.

Obviously many different DAWs are available, but for my purposes Reaper has everything I need. Plus it's free. This post will focus on using Reaper but I guess most DAWs will have very similar setup principles.


Hardware Setup

It's quite simple really.
1. connect the V-Drums to the Audio Interface using the stereo jack cable
2. connect the Audio Interface to the laptop using the USB cable

Software Setup

Also very simple.

1. open up the DAW (in my case, Reaper) and go to the Audio Device settings. In Reaper you find this in the top-right corner (click 'audio device closed').


2. set the recording device as 'ASIO' and then select the Audio Interface

3. after you click 'ok', the Audio Interface details may not immediately display in the top-right corner, but should show up when you start a recording or playback

4. Final step - create a new track and set the recording to 'arm' (red button). I've called this track 'V-Drums' as a default

5. ...and that's all there is to it. Hit 'record' and off you go! When I'm recording an initial drum track, I will generally stick an mp3 of the song into Reaper on a separate track - just click and drag it into Reaper from a folder on your PC

There are a lot of other things to consider at this stage. For example if you want to record the drums using Reaper's internal click source then you have to set this before importing the mp3 track. And of course you have to know the exact tempo of the mp3 so you can match the click (which itself can involve some tedious use of Reaper's 'nudge' function). However it's worth getting this right so you can record accurately



If you have any questions about this post, recording V-Drums or using Reaper, feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email. I'll try to answer what I can!

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