Riaan wrote
Am I right in guessing that the "dry kits" are the emulated sound of drums as miked close, without room acoustics colouring the sound, and "wet kits" are those where drums are miked close up as well as from further away to emulate room acoustics?
That's right. Any normal miking will actually pick up the room acoustics (especially the overheads and obviously any room mics), but for sampling for software and electronic drum kits they will often record in a very dry room and also gate out as much room sound as possible. That being said, the drum room ambience is often "the glue that binds", helping pull together all the discrete drums into sounding like a kit.
And to get a good drum sound: is it best to add different drum components in seperate tracks in order to apply different effects to each, for example snare on one track with compression, etc.?
Almost always. While I usually do a single stereo output from EZDrummer for the competitions, that's purely for time and I'd never do it in a complete track. The biggest reason to keep each separate is so you can apply different processing to each track - especially reverb. The right amount of reverb for a snare is often way too much for the kick drum and cymbals and if the kick sounds good, there is usually not enough on the rest of the kit. I like to keep the kick drum (and bass guitar) pretty dry to keep the low end solid and anchor the pulse (Jimmy Page school of production).
Keeping the drum instruments apart, you can also do things like gated reverb for a snare or sidechains to key the bass to the kick, etc. to tighten things up.
Other than an overall peak limiter on the drum buss and sometimes a compressor on a kick drum, I try not to use much dynamics processing on individual drums. They are responsible for a lot of the dynamics in a recording, so less is definitely more. Remember, in the studio, dynamics compressors are mostly used as problem-solvers rather than effects, you don't insert one unless you have to.
The more I play around with the software, the more I realise it's not easy to get a good sounding drum track...there's always something sounding just not right with mine but I can't put my finger on exactly what it is.
Send me an example mix and I'll give it a crit - post it in the clips for review section and maybe we can get Matt and Neps' to opine too. ?
Most drum software has a big limitation for me - the individual drums are all too discrete. Miking up a kit, you get lots of bleed from one mic to another, toms and kick will trigger snare buzz and you can never really escape the overheads, which as a stereo pair fix the panning somewhat, affect the cymbal mix and pick up a lot of the room.
Some styles of music (particularly Jazz), your overheads are everything - you get a good impression of the kit using just the OH first, then you reinforce the individual drums only where neccessary using the close mics. Rock is the reverse, where the close mics form the basis of the sound, the OH mics are highpass filtered to bias them more to the cymbals, and are brought in mostly for the cymbals and to add a little "air" to the kit. Either way, the OH mics add a lot of character and cohesiveness to the drum kit as a whole - as do any room mics.
