In our quest to bring back the iconic drum sounds of the 80s for the Arcade Orchestra tour, we’re experimenting with Roland’s VAD706 kit, triggering lots of custom samples as well as a few commercial ones like Hitmaker SDX. One of the main things we wanted to explore was whether real cymbals can be used with an electronic kit – and whether the cymbal mics would pick up too much of the noise from the kit. We want to use real cymbals if at all possible when we tour, so this was an important question to answer.
Here’s a quick first test using a a riff on Phil Collins’ “I Don’t Care Anymore.” Disclaimer: I’m a keyboard player who wishes he was drummer… and the cymbals are just old cheap ones I had laying around, so they’re not matched or mixed properly. Just wanted to throw something together to see whether this idea could work 😉
https://youtu.be/CRPJnfQIARs
Jim Daneker
CEO, Producer
www.arcadeorchestra.com
