Don't give up! Close to cracking the drum tracking code. I've been tempted to actually use a real drummer. It's the only instrument I never really played well enough to use for recording tracks. The only thing is, I hate having musicians in the studio. Mainly cause most of them will steal your equipment as soon as you're away.

Basic tracks will be up by this weekend. Weird techy things about doing drum tracks via midi and samples, even if a drummer plays the triggers for MIDI data. There's all sorts of MIDI editors to auto correct timing, then auto mess it up, so it doesn't sound inhumanly perfect or give it human "feel".

Also strange to old engineers, we used to go through major efforts to gate real drums to get rid of the natural acoustics of the drum booth, as drum tones would bleed over into open drum mics from parts of the kit that weren't being played. i.e. tom tom mics picked up the snare drum as a hollow ambient noise, so adding a gate closed the mics until the toms were actually played.

Now there is a 20 minute tutorial involving 34 complex steps with effects and application techniques to recreate the bleed over effect from drum samples to simulate the drum booth that we used to work so hard to cover up. A great deal of flawless digital recording software is being designed and incorprated to recreate the flaws in analog recording we once sought to get rid of at every chance. So in the old days, whenever I missed the levels and caused tape saturation (distortion) it wasn't really a mistake. It was just a future ingenuis insight to modern effects!