[Steve Moore]

I have to agree with aussie...

The beauty of MIDI drums is that they are completely editable. What's more, you can record the tracks and THEN decide what sounds you want. There are a million good drum samples out there.

Drums sampled in a good studio with good mics can give you great sounds with little or no extra processing required. This frees up resources.

You can even record multiple drummers and mix and match the sessions down to the quarter measure. Because the final drum sounds are triggered later this works.

For a good vdrum kit to work though YOU NEED SUFFICIENT AUDIO OUTPUTS.

A good vdrum setup has at least 10-12 audio outs so it IS as good as mic placement, maybe better, especially if you can't afford a drum room and a truckload of good mics.

I assign the isolated outs to my digital board and generate the sounds (first generation) at mixdown. This frees up a dozen Pro Tools tracks.

It takes a little tweaking at first to get the drum modules setup for isolated outputs, but then there is a big payoff. You have complete control at mixdown just as though you had mic'd an acoustic kit, but with ZERO bleed. And volume is never an issue since the recording can be done under phones or at low levels if needed.

And correcting mistakes is a breeze with MIDI and a pain the you know what with audio.

Of course there are a few things a drummer can't quite do on vdrums but they are IMO not noticeable in the final mix of most projects.

One final word, get vdrums with mesh heads that play like real drums. Then put them through one or more drum modules. I use an Alesis Sr16, D4, DmPro and Kurzweil K2000.

BTW, alot of drummers will snarl at the idea of playing an electronic kit (understandable), however, in my experience I have yet to find someone who can tell the difference in the final mix... that is to say that someone (average listener) can tell the difference between a drummer playing am acoustic kit vs a vdrum kit... if the engineer does his job right and there are good sample on isolated outputs.