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Increasingly the drummers that discover the world of online session drumming are playing electronic kits. Perhaps they don't have space for a full acoustic set up, or they have to play at home and live in a built up area.

Many are doubtful that customers will want electronic drum tracks in their songs so they resign themselves to charging less than us acoustic folks because, in their mind, they are offering an inferior service.
So how much of this is true and where do electronic drums fit in the future of Online Session Drumming?

An Easier Start

First off, if you're on a budget it's a lot easier to get a good sounding result on an electronic kit. A LOT easier. The room, the pre amps, microphones, tuning, and to an extent the mixing and processing are all taken out of the equation instantly. And these areas are the main areas that many beginner OSDs struggle with most.

The inbuilt sounds on many electronic kits are adequate for some OSD jobs and if the client is simply after a stereo mix, the quickest and easiest way to offer them this is just to take stereo outputs from the brain and email them across.

But this is barely scratching the surface of what electronic kits can offer, and in my opinion doesn't even begin to do them justice in terms of the impact they can have on OSD-ing.

Software like Superior Drummer is quietly transforming the way a lot of commercial records are made, and it's not hard to see why. The sounds are phenomenal – the best-tuned kits recorded by the best engineers with the best mics and pre amps in the best studios in the world, and far beyond what most (perhaps any?) acoustic drummers could achieve on their own. Hooking up an electronic kit via MIDI to Superior Drummer puts you at the stool of an awesome tool.

And electronic drums are the tool that give us the fantastic sound achievable in Superior Drummer et al without losing the human feel and the orchestration of a real drummer. Electronic kits are an interface between this near-flawless sound and human expression.

Then of course there are the editing benefits of using MIDI triggered tracks. While our software is becoming more intelligent at helping us edit audio tracks as if they were MIDI tracks, it's still a fair distance off. The ability to instantly speed up or slow down a MIDI drum track by a couple bpm should not be overlooked, as should the ease at which sections can be swapped around, the hi hat taken from 1/8ths to 1/4s in the verse etc. Editing MIDI drums vs. editing acoustic drums is like fishing with a net vs. fishing with a spear.

Of course acoustic drum recording has been launching its own fight back with the increasing use of sample programs like Drumagog, Superior Drummer and ApTrigga to 'beef up' acoustic drum tracks. You know my attitude to this: if it makes the tracks sound better, I say use it. There will always be people (both drummers and clients, luckily!) that resist the new fad and prefer to stick to the traditional way of doing things, and that's entirely OK.

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