While it’s possible with the setup described immediately above to send MIDI information from an electronic kit into a computer that is running both the multitrack recording software and the soft-synth, this can bog down the CPU. Even then, fiddling with the buffer is usually a necessary balancing act. Latency is a much more common beast with soft-synth drumming, and installation isn’t recommended unless it’s on a fairly powerful computer. Additionally, the Alesis Trigger/iO MIDI converter is half the price of any drum brain (keep in mind, however, that unlike a drum brain, a MIDI converter has no tones of its own), and only requires the addition of software like FXpansion’s exhaustingly magnificent BFD2. One of the really cool things about this scenario is that it’s a much more malleable triggering system. Voila! Latency crisis scenario #1 is averted. There are two easy ways to wire this: 1) monitor the drums from the headphone jack on the sound module while mixing the rest of the band through an auxiliary input within the module (thankfully, most brains have this feature), 2) If, however, there is no aux input, most modules come with an additional aux out/send that can be plugged into the studio’s headphone monitoring system.
For monitoring purposes, it’s best to avoid all potential latency-causing scenarios and monitor the tones before they are sent to the computer. Even a few milliseconds of latency can disturb a drummer’s performance. Regardless of the module or the number of outputs, a solid performance on an electronic kit hinges on avoiding latency.
It has ten analog outputs, making the channel array of an electronic drum–tracking session very similar to that of an acoustic session. Thankfully, the designers at Roland realized these problems and solved them with the TD-20X, the gateway to a new era of electronic drumming professionalism. Unfortunately, most drum modules don’t offer more than just one or two measly pairs of stereo outputs, and there’s only so much mixing to be done with such a limited arrangement. When recording electronic drums there are two options for the audio source: either an out-of-the-box performance with a sound module (for instance, Roland’s TD-20X), or an inside-of-the-box job triggering tones from within a computer using drum synthesizing software like BFD or EZdrummer. Prior to getting your mitts dirty with the details of deconstruction, the first order of business is determining the origin of the sound source.
While these two electronic tenets are radically different in both purpose and sound, their tones can be captured and treated in much the same way. For example, there’s no need for thousands of dollars worth of microphones, a live room that costs $400 a day (engineer not included), and tones aren’t set in stone when the red light turns on Perks (and pillows aside), the electronic kit serves two functions in the studio: as a substitute for the real thing and as its own entity, capable of sounding like all the things an acoustic kit never could. But with perks that extend beyond the gates of silent campiness, electronic drums also have amazing advantages in the recording field.