drum triggers

Nick Hiebert

6 years ago

As someone who has worked in professional audio production for many years, I've noticed that people still don't seem to understand the reason triggers are used in professional metal production. Without triggers, you have to use extreme processing (compression, equalization, limiting, gating, etc.) in order to make the kick drum clear enough to hear during high speed double-kick lines. If you're willing to mangle the "natural" sound that much, you might as well resort to triggers. You have to think about what's going on with the kick drum itself. Every time you hit it, the entire head flexes, wobbles, and bends repeatedly and can sometimes take several seconds to fully rest again. If you strike it again before the resonance dissipates, you essentially add to the resonance. If you strike it fast enough repeatedly, you end up with a blurred mess of wobbly-sounding nothing. Individual strikes are audible, of course, but you need to work hard to clean up the sloppy-sounding undertones. It's much easier and more pragmatic from a production standpoint, and even a performance standpoint, to use triggers as a means of clarifying the sound. The sound actually produced by striking a 22" kick drum 700 times per minute is incompatible with the sound required to make a record sound polished. Anyone in professional recording can attest to this.