As most of you know, I’m a big fan of EZDrummer. I used it exclusively on my latest album for all of my drum sounds.
While there’s no replacement for recording a good drummer in a great-sounding room, EZDrummer lets us home studio hacks get great drum sounds for MUCH less than we would spend on booking a professional studio or even buying all the mics, preamps, and stands we would need to record drums ourselves.
First things first.
I want to re-iterate this before I give you some tips for dealing with virtual drum software.
Use a real drummer if you can. While software is amazing, you’ll always be better off recording a real human on drums.
Mark, one of my readers (and a member of MixWithUs.com) asked in the comments section if EZDrummer has a “humanize” function. It does. I forgot to mention this, but it’s the little button on the bottom left side.
The bigger question, though, is what does “humanize” mean and why should you care about it?
Cold, Lifeless Drummer
In a perfect world, we would all have a huge drum room in our home studios. We’d have a closet FULL of great mics, great preamps, plenty of inputs, and a top-notch drummer and drum kit.
In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t live in a perfect world. Down here in reality it costs thousands of dollars to build out a drum room and buy all the necessary equipment to track drums. And it still costs several hundred dollars to hire out a studio and record the drums there.
First off, let me just say that if you CAN record live drums, do it. If that’s not possible, you’ll need to turn to virtual drum software, such as EZDrummer, BFD, DrumCore, Steven Slate Drums, etc.
