Most drum machines give you a stereo pair and a set of individual outputs that many owners never patch. The stereo pair is a mix — somebody else’s balance, somebody else’s summing, and in a hybrid machine, somebody else’s choice about which stages your analog voices pass through on the way out.
This guide is about using the other jacks. It is prompted by Roland’s TR-1000 update 1.50, which added a routing option that sends all analog elements out through the AFX output for a pure analog path, and another that routes USB audio to the individual outs — but nothing here is specific to that machine.
Why bother
Four concrete reasons, in rough order of how much difference they make.
Compression stops being a compromise. On a stereo bus, a compressor set to control the kick is also reacting to every hat. Split the kick out and you can set a fast attack and a heavy ratio on it alone. This is the single biggest improvement most people hear.
EQ stops fighting itself. A high-pass that cleans up the hats takes the body out of the kick. Separate channels, separate filters.
You can print a clean analog path. On a hybrid machine, the stereo out often sums analog voices through a digital stage — an effects engine, a master bus, a converter. If the machine offers an analog-only output route, that is the one to record when the analog character is the reason you bought it.
Reamping and outboard become per-voice. Sending just the snare to a spring reverb or a guitar pedal is a different musical move from sending the whole kit.
What you need
- A mixer or a multi-input audio interface with as many inputs as voices you want to split
- Unbalanced TS cables for most drum machine individual outs — they are usually unbalanced, so keep them short
- Optionally DI boxes or a mixer with transformer-isolated inputs, if you hit hum
A practical floor: four separate channels — kick, snare, hats, everything else — gets you most of the benefit. Eight is luxurious. You do not need one per voice.
The setup, step by step
1. Find out what the individual outs actually do. Read the manual on this specific point, because machines differ in two ways that matter. First, whether patching an individual out removes that voice from the main stereo mix (many do — this is normal and usually what you want) or leaves it in both (which will double the voice if you record both). Second, whether the individual out is pre- or post- the machine’s internal effects, filter and level control. Pre-fader individual outs mean the machine’s own volume knob does nothing to what you are recording.
2. Decide what goes where. Give the kick and snare their own channels first. Put hats and cymbals on a stereo pair if the machine offers one, because hat panning is usually part of the sound. Group the rest.
3. Set gain at the mixer, not the machine. Start with the machine’s per-voice level at its design position — usually unity or fully up, depending on whether the out is pre- or post-level — and set your input gain for a healthy peak with headroom. Aim for peaks around −12 to −6 dBFS going in. Drum transients are much taller than they look on an averaging meter, so leave more room than feels necessary.
4. Check mono compatibility before you commit. Sum your split channels to mono and listen. If a voice vanishes or thins dramatically, you have a polarity problem somewhere in the patch.
5. Record a reference pass of the stereo out too, once, at the start. It costs one take and gives you something to compare your own balance against. More than once, the machine’s own mix turns out to be better than the first thing you build from the parts.
The traps
Hum, and where it comes from. Multiple unbalanced cables between two mains-powered boxes is the textbook recipe for a ground loop. Symptoms: a 50/60 Hz buzz that gets worse with more cables patched. Fixes, in the order to try them: plug the drum machine and the mixer into the same outlet or power strip; shorten the cables; use a DI box or transformer-isolated input on the offending channel. Do not use a ground-lift adapter on a mains plug — it is a shock hazard, not a fix.
Pre-fader outs and the mix you cannot hear. If the individual outs are pre-fader and pre-effects, the balance you carefully built on the machine’s own faders is not in your recording at all. Everything arrives flat and dry. That is usually desirable, but it is a surprise the first time, and it means your monitoring path has to be the mixer, not the machine.
Latency when the DAW is in the loop. If you are routing USB audio back out through the machine’s jacks, or processing a split voice through a plugin and returning it, you are adding a round trip. Measure it with a loopback rather than trusting the buffer figure, and use your DAW’s delay compensation. Analog outboard has no such delay, which is one of its real remaining advantages.
Doubling. If the individual outs do not remove voices from the main mix, and you record both the splits and the stereo pair, you will have every voice twice with slightly different processing. Pick one.
Unbalanced cable runs. Keep them under about three metres where you can. Unbalanced lines pick up interference proportional to length, and a drum machine’s individual outs are often also low-ish level.
Where to go next
Once the voices are separate, the techniques that were unavailable become obvious: parallel compression on the kick alone, a transient designer on the snare, saturating the hats without smearing the low end, sidechaining a bass part to a kick that is now its own signal. The point of splitting is not the split — it is that every decision afterwards gets to be about one drum.
If your machine has an analog-only output route, record through it once and A/B against the normal stereo out. Whether you can hear a difference is worth knowing before you build a workflow around it.
Sources
- Tutorials | DrumBrute Impact, Episode 4: Exploring Connectivity — Arturia on YouTube
- Roland TR-1000 Rhythm Creator, Version 1.50 Update — RolandChannel on YouTube