Hi I'm Ryan Jenkinson and welcome to our short video on hybrid drumming. So throughout the
course of this video we're hopefully going to give you a bit of an idea about how to
make your existing acoustic drum kit into a hybrid drum kit and hopefully answer a few
questions along the way.
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The musical landscape has changed for us drummers, because technology has pushed the boundaries
of what's possible further and further. So when it comes to taking your new record out
on the road, maybe the 4 or 5 drums you've got infront of you aren't going to cut it. So why not
add thousands more drums but without having the hassle of having to set them up. With
a hybrid set up you can have thousands of sounds. All here, you can have hand claps,
you can have clavets, handbells, you can even have explosions and sounds effects. But they're
all here ready, just at the hit of a stick.
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So once you've got your hybrid set up, how are we going to play the new electronic sounds?
Ok well there are many ways. The first of all is by playing the onboard pads on either
the sample pad or the percussion pad. Just by hitting these, whichever sounds you assign
to them will play out through your front house. The second way is to add additional pads which
you can position around your kit. The first one is kind of a mesh pad, so its already
a real kind of drum feel. And the second one is a space saving bar pad. So again you can again
fit that into your existing set up and make it comfy. Ok, the last way is to actually
trigger your acoustic drums, so you're not going to be hitting anything extra. Everytime
you hit one of your acoustic drums like your snare drum, it will also trigger a snare drum
sound or any other sound you want simultaneously via your sample or percussion pad.
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The reason I use a hybrid set up is because we spent so long in the studio trawling over
getting the right kick drum and the right snare drum sounds, that when it comes to taking
it live, I'd kind of like to use those same kick drum and snare drum sounds but blend
them with the sound of the acoustic kit. So we get a really overdriven 909 big fat kick
drum, blend it with the big fat kick drum sound that comes out of a 22 by 20, and really
the drum sounds, every single night, bang on, amazing. So I couldn't go back now.
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So when it comes to triggering your acoustic drums, let me show you how easy it is. We've
got the trigger on our snare drum, we've got the trigger on our kick drum. So here's just
the acoustic sounds. For the snare. So now I'm going to turn the volume up on the sample
pad so you'll also hear what I'm triggering. Ok so this is the kick drum. So that's a sound
you're not going to get out of an acoustic drum, but simply by assigning that to the
kick drum trigger, it will play every time I hit it. Let's try that on the snare. Now
I've gone slightly different with this and I've set this trigger to trigger a crazy sort
of really messed up synthy sound hand clap. Let's have a listen. It sounds crazy on its
own, but in a beat...
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If you're looking to go hybrid, its not actually as hard as you might think. Just take your
existing acoustic drum kit and then add an electronic sound source. Now if you've got
an electronic kit, you could use your existing module. If not, you could use a sample pad
or digital percussion pad and then you need to find a way to trigger it. To trigger it
is just to play it. So you can play it by using the onboard pads or by adding extra
things to hit around your kit like mesh pads or bar pads or by using these guys on your
acoustic drums to trigger the sound.
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