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Post by yotonic on Sept 3, 2017 18:15:17 GMT -6
What always gets left out of these discussions is that "in general' most bands aren't very good. It's been that way since the 50s. Then all of a sudden some one and his band come along and they are so incredibly talented that they put their art form and genre on the map, and suddenly everyone loves heavy metal, or grunge, or rock, or whatever. Art is only as relevant as the Masters who are able to elevate it beyond the norm. You can always find a "scene" during any decade of tight knit fans and talented players. But true greatness that leaves a mark on history has far less to do with the number of chords played, the style of dress, or the current status of the genre. The great ones make any genre relevant.
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Post by Tbone81 on Sept 3, 2017 18:20:15 GMT -6
What always gets left out of these discussions is that "in general' most bands aren't very good. It's been that way since the 50s. Then all of a sudden some one and his band come along and they are so incredibly talented that they put their art form and genre on the map, and suddenly everyone loves heavy metal, or grunge, or rock, or whatever. Art is only as relevant as the Masters who are able to elevate it beyond the norm. You can always find a "scene" during any decade of tight knit fans and talented players. But true greatness that leaves a mark on history has far less to do with the number of chords played, the style of dress, or the current status of the genre. The great ones make any genre relevant. Well said, couldn't agree more.
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Post by thehightenor on Sept 5, 2017 5:26:42 GMT -6
Maybe "Punk" in the USA had a different story? Well, yes. As I understand it, punk didn't even exist in the UK until the Ramones came over the first time. In the US it was different, and there had been punk movements on the east coast and in Northern California that were fully developed before the British thing happened - in fact the British influence had a negative effect on US punk, bringing in a lot of poseurs and conformity. Actually, when you get right down to it, American punk rock dates back to the late '50s and Link Wray. Yes I think you're spot on with this. Speaking as a Brit I loved US Punk acts - as you say they had an authenticity about them.
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Post by mrholmes on Sept 5, 2017 5:57:35 GMT -6
So enough of Hijacking the topic please!! It is about how fake drums can sonud or can not sound good, and not about the old Punk times... Sorry guys. @noah sahin Your advises made me curious. So the question was to me... Can I get Logic drummer to play a drum sound I am very familiar with, a Blues Shuffle. It took me a while (30 Minutes) to tell the computer which feel to play, but when it made click, its no big deal anymore. And to my suprise. If I would rework the fills it sounds damn close to one of my favourte Blues Drummers from my Home Town in West Germany. He was mentoinded two times in the US Cadence Magazin. To my big surprise, now Logics drummer plays a lot of diffrent snare articulations without any rework.... Seems it depends on the stile of music. drive.google.com/file/d/0B2rBQEXeXf8LQzNYNXBzejhCdzg/view?usp=sharing
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Post by Martin John Butler on Sept 5, 2017 8:10:58 GMT -6
Logic's "Drummer" still confuses me, but I'll take some time and learn to use it in the next couple of weeks. Having EZ Drummer and Superior Drummer is an advantage if I can get used to quickly using Logic's Drummer to create a basic drum pattern for the entire song. Then, in theory I can copy the midi to a Superior Drummer track, tweak the parts, use some other patterns and also use SD drum sounds if I don't like Logic's drum sounds.
One thing that's making it difficult for me is that EZ Drummer has a feature where you can tap in a basic drum beat, and it automatically finds the patterns closes to your original, saving a lot of time. I don't know why, but when I try doing that, there's tremendous latency, so instead of creating a simple beat to search with, it creates a mess.
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Post by EmRR on Sept 5, 2017 8:11:49 GMT -6
....and I'll drag off topic again, here's a quote from an NPR article on the reworking/reissue of the Hüsker Dü records, which is either massively misquoted or massively wrong in the understanding of what and why it went down as it did:
Come on. Many punk records of this era were made in scant hours, many times on rented used tape that was then immediately wiped after mix down. No money, no time....does not define bad engineering. There really was an aesthetic of making it sound as grating and shitty as possible on purpose to sound as far away from Air Supply as possible. All of that is lost on anyone who wasn't there to some degree.
johneppstein probably hasn't seen this, I hadn't. British band in 1966, no British career to speak of, but big in Finland and Italy.
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Post by Martin John Butler on Sept 5, 2017 8:14:47 GMT -6
Seriously, someone start a new Punk thread, mrholmes is right, let's get somewhere in the ballpark of the topic please.
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Post by johneppstein on Sept 5, 2017 10:26:57 GMT -6
....and I'll drag off topic again, here's a quote from an NPR article on the reworking/reissue of the Hüsker Dü records, which is either massively misquoted or massively wrong in the understanding of what and why it went down as it did: Come on. Many punk records of this era were made in scant hours, many times on rented used tape that was then immediately wiped after mix down. No money, no time....does not define bad engineering. There really was an aesthetic of making it sound as grating and shitty as possible on purpose to sound as far away from Air Supply as possible. All of that is lost on anyone who wasn't there to some degree. johneppstein probably hasn't seen this, I hadn't. British band in 1966, no British career to speak of, but big in Finland and Italy. Old Bill Haley tune, written by Dickie Thompson.
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Post by Tbone81 on Sept 5, 2017 11:53:00 GMT -6
Anyone else find cymbals to be a real weak spot with programmed drums? Things like cymbal swells and HH articulations/accents are so hard to get right imho. I've experimented with using cymbals from BFD with drums from SSD, which in theory could work well, but in practice is very clumsy. Anyone have this problem and/or work arounds?
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Post by Martin John Butler on Sept 5, 2017 14:24:42 GMT -6
Crashes are difficult to get the right amount of hit. So I tend to put very few in my tracks generally. Same thing with the snare, if they're hit too hard, you just can't tame it. At least I haven't been able to.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 5, 2017 20:15:19 GMT -6
I'd still love a decent remix of Zen Arcade.
(Sorry, being deliberately OT at this point).
For those struggling with cymbal sounds, why not overdub crashes? They're probably the easiest to fake into a recording with a couple of pencil mics and a decent reverb.
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Post by schmalzy on Sept 6, 2017 8:39:10 GMT -6
For those struggling with cymbal sounds, why not overdub crashes? They're probably the easiest to fake into a recording with a couple of pencil mics and a decent reverb. 100% on this. If NOTHING else, leave the hihats out of the programmed drums and overdub the hats. In PUNK - a thing I can't know anything about because I wasn't born yet - the hihat (and ride) is super important and really needs a little swing to feel real. Also, many other styles also rely on rhythmic subdivisions often supplied by hihats. With a damn nearly locked-to-the-downbeat kick and snare, an overdubbed hihat really helps to make it sound more real. I'd recommend overdubbing the ride as well. I recently had to drop a ton of kick drum hits into a metal song. It changed how I'll deal with programmed drums from here-on-out. Basically, the guy could play the fast 16th-note double-kick part PRETTY well when his kick was tuned super tight and it shot the beaters back at him. Unfortunately, his kick drum sounded awful at that tuning. Not only that, but that tighter tuning interacted with the shells a lot more and there was a ton more resonance and sympathetic ringing we weren't happy about. He wanted the kick lower, I wanted it lower, the shells wanted it lower, and - most importantly - the song wanted it lower. We tuned it down. He couldn't quite play the part still and we only had one day for a fairly djenty/rhythmically complex metal song. So, there's a section of a song where the kicks were all dropped in by hand. I had something like 12 kick samples we had taken that day. I dropped 'em into the section in a random-esque order. It's something like 128-ish hits. It still sounded machine-gun-like. I thought about a drummer actually playing the part. What would be happening? Some would be louder, some would be quieter. Some beater hits would bury more, some would bounce off the head more. Some would be a little behind the beat (most likely, because it's a fast-as-hell) and some would get ahead. Sure, but when? So I went in and did some nudging. Just a few milliseconds, I think. I'd basically took sections of 4/5/6 hits - whatever - and nudge 'em off the grid by the same amount. Some of the sections that got nudged overlapped (so one or two of the first set of hits I nudged would also be in the second set of hits I nudged - a little randomness and "human" variation). Then I automated a pre-fx volume and I automated a pre-rest-of-the-fx-chain transient designer. I corresponded louder transients with the louder pre-fx volume automation. Randomly automated a hair of extra sustain from the transient designer into some of them. A couple passes doing some hand-on-trackpad automating and it sounded a lot more natural. It's still superhuman in playing but at least we don't instantly and obviously hear it. Maybe the key to making programmed drums sound real is in that volume and transient designer automation. In some programs, just automating/redrawing the MIDI volume information will be enough to make those hits sound less identical in attack/sustain envelope. If not, that transient designer automation might do a lot of good work to get us where we need to go.
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Post by mrholmes on Sept 10, 2017 15:02:35 GMT -6
I think the hats sound the most static after I checked the last three songs which I wrote. That is maybe the reason why I most often mix them as low as they can get.
For crashes and ride I think the ones in XLN sound much better than any other drum sampler.
I am not a drummer I just say what I like.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 15, 2017 7:01:07 GMT -6
I've got a 2 Box Drummit 5, sounds far more natural than any VST plugin I've come across with the obvious downside you have to play the kit. Although besides from a bit of clack it ain't that loud.. Problem I've found with E-drum kits is they're either very expensive, expensive and sound bad or expensive and poorly built..
My Drummit is a bit of a mishmash of Roland and 2Box hardware with a complete mesh head swap, the kick sensitivity was too poor to live with. I looked into a TD-30 but for the cost they sound way too fake.
There's the Yamaha Mimic Pro out for release soon in Europe, it looks rather interesting..
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Post by swurveman on Sept 15, 2017 10:03:45 GMT -6
So enough of Hijacking the topic please!! It is about how fake drums can sonud or can not sound good, and not about the old Punk times... Sorry guys. I am currently working with a metal-ish band where we tracked a live drummer. The leader of the band went home and quantized every close miced drum piece. He now wants to use Drumagog to Trigger the BFD Drum Vst. He's so anal that I know he's gonna want to get rid of the overheads mic and draw in crashes. I want to say "why did you even bring in your drummer" , but am going along to get along. They aren't a terrible band, but I'd rather have kept the live drums with the original groove ad drum sounds. At least they'd sound original. They are gonna end up with another generic song in the heap of generic songs on the internet. It's a bad time for music, but the bands are driving it as well as the enginners.
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Post by mrholmes on Sept 15, 2017 10:46:04 GMT -6
So enough of Hijacking the topic please!! It is about how fake drums can sonud or can not sound good, and not about the old Punk times... Sorry guys. I am currently working with a metal-ish band where we tracked a live drummer. The leader of the band went home and quantized every close miced drum piece. He now wants to use Drumagog to Trigger the BFD Drum Vst. He's so anal that I know he's gonna want to get rid of the overheads mic and draw in crashes. I want to say "why did you even bring in your drummer" , but am going along to get along. They aren't a terrible band, but I'd rather have kept the live drums with the original groove ad drum sounds. At least they'd sound original. They are gonna end up with another generic song in the heap of generic songs on the internet. It's a bad time for music, but the bands are driving it as well as the enginners. ÄHHHH He brings in a drummer to repalce it with BFD? Why killing the human feel? I bet when your drums are done the first question will be if you can make the drums sound more real.... My question goes in case you have no budget or no time for a drum session.... Scatty world, bringing in your buddy and repalce him with a trigger???
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Post by Tbone81 on Sept 15, 2017 13:59:11 GMT -6
So enough of Hijacking the topic please!! It is about how fake drums can sonud or can not sound good, and not about the old Punk times... Sorry guys. I am currently working with a metal-ish band where we tracked a live drummer. The leader of the band went home and quantized every close miced drum piece. He now wants to use Drumagog to Trigger the BFD Drum Vst. He's so anal that I know he's gonna want to get rid of the overheads mic and draw in crashes. I want to say "why did you even bring in your drummer" , but am going along to get along. They aren't a terrible band, but I'd rather have kept the live drums with the original groove ad drum sounds. At least they'd sound original. They are gonna end up with another generic song in the heap of generic songs on the internet. It's a bad time for music, but the bands are driving it as well as the enginners. For better or worse this is pretty standard practice in the metal world. Although crashes and HH etc. are usually the only thing not replaced. I've found that the best sound for this genre comes from blending samples with the orignal tracks, but still relying heavily on samples. The hard part is to make it sound great you really need rack Tom samples that are tuned the same as your kit, which can be problematic if you didn't sample the actual drum kit you recorded. Getting all the samples to sound right can be tedious work. Good luck, I feel for you! The only suggestion I have is to maybe do your version of the drum mix, without telling him what you've done or haven't done. And then let him pick between the two? He might surprise himself that he likes your approach better.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 15, 2017 16:54:08 GMT -6
To be mean: Hard Rock and Metal Bands are obsessed with sounding as lame and terrible as possible. They all use the same rigs, play the same riffs, record the same way and want it all edited down the exact same way. They are what makes everyone proclaim that rock is dead, and they're not wrong to.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 15, 2017 17:55:36 GMT -6
To be mean: Hard Rock and Metal Bands are obsessed with sounding as lame and terrible as possible. They all use the same rigs, play the same riffs, record the same way and want it all edited down the exact same way. They are what makes everyone proclaim that rock is dead, and they're not wrong to. In all fairness metal is an extremely difficult music genre (and sub genre) to get into, for a start metal is niche and trying to find a decent drummer is like finding a well of gold in your back yard; also to note things like superior drummer only served to make them rarer. A decent 8 piece kit isn't cheap and all the gubbins extra you need for it, they are extremely loud and it's not easy to practice when you have neighbours.. It's one of the most difficult genre's to play, extremely technically involved and requires en mass stamina.. You ever tried to play a two hour set in an extreme metal band? On top of that, with metal being so niche if you decide to waver from popular genre's the chances of being noticed and / or semi-successful is abysmal at best.. It takes a hell of a lot of skill, money, determination and stubbornness to even produce a mediocre demo. On the flip side, metal / rock is mainly made up of guitarists (a lot of them very talented must admit) and the odd basist.. So if you're a half decent metal drummer / singer you can get a band without trying too hard.
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Post by mrholmes on Sept 15, 2017 19:51:50 GMT -6
To be mean: Hard Rock and Metal Bands are obsessed with sounding as lame and terrible as possible. They all use the same rigs, play the same riffs, record the same way and want it all edited down the exact same way. They are what makes everyone proclaim that rock is dead, and they're not wrong to. In all fairness metal is an extremely difficult music genre (and sub genre) to get into, for a start metal is niche and trying to find a decent drummer is like finding a well of gold in your back yard; also to note things like superior drummer only served to make them rarer. A decent 8 piece kit isn't cheap and all the gubbins extra you need for it, they are extremely loud and it's not easy to practice when you have neighbours.. It's one of the most difficult genre's to play, extremely technically involved and requires en mass stamina.. You ever tried to play a two hour set in an extreme metal band? On top of that, with metal being so niche if you decide to waver from popular genre's the chances of being noticed and / or semi-successful is abysmal at best.. It takes a hell of a lot of skill, money, determination and stubbornness to even produce a mediocre demo. On the flip side, metal / rock is mainly made up of guitarists (a lot of them very talented must admit) and the odd basist.. So if you're a half decent metal drummer / singer you can get a band without trying too hard. OT again...
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Post by mrholmes on Sept 15, 2017 20:00:13 GMT -6
To be mean: Hard Rock and Metal Bands are obsessed with sounding as lame and terrible as possible. They all use the same rigs, play the same riffs, record the same way and want it all edited down the exact same way. They are what makes everyone proclaim that rock is dead, and they're not wrong to. I am fine with that if they like to replace near the whole kid and want to edit out the human imperfections, or every little mistake...sounds very boring to me. If I use sample drums dependig on the music, I try to make them as real as I can....
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Post by johneppstein on Sept 15, 2017 21:50:51 GMT -6
To be mean: Hard Rock and Metal Bands are obsessed with sounding as lame and terrible as possible. They all use the same rigs, play the same riffs, record the same way and want it all edited down the exact same way. They are what makes everyone proclaim that rock is dead, and they're not wrong to. In all fairness metal is an extremely difficult music genre (and sub genre) to get into, for a start metal is niche and trying to find a decent drummer is like finding a well of gold in your back yard; also to note things like superior drummer only served to make them rarer. A decent 8 piece kit isn't cheap and all the gubbins extra you need for it, they are extremely loud and it's not easy to practice when you have neighbours.. It's one of the most difficult genre's to play, extremely technically involved and requires en mass stamina.. You ever tried to play a two hour set in an extreme metal band? On top of that, with metal being so niche if you decide to waver from popular genre's the chances of being noticed and / or semi-successful is abysmal at best.. It takes a hell of a lot of skill, money, determination and stubbornness to even produce a mediocre demo. On the flip side, metal / rock is mainly made up of guitarists (a lot of them very talented must admit) and the odd basist.. So if you're a half decent metal drummer / singer you can get a band without trying too hard. Back in the '80s I knew a crapload of metal drummers who were very good. The scarcity of good metal drummers started about the same time that sample replacement and drum software started becoming common . Cause and effect? I'm not going to comment. But for a drummer to play evenly and in time takes actual work and replacing all the beat to hell heads on a big metal kit gets a tad expensive.... not to mention tuning them. Never underestimate the attraction of laziness.
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Post by jazznoise on Sept 16, 2017 7:57:43 GMT -6
To be mean: Hard Rock and Metal Bands are obsessed with sounding as lame and terrible as possible. They all use the same rigs, play the same riffs, record the same way and want it all edited down the exact same way. They are what makes everyone proclaim that rock is dead, and they're not wrong to. In all fairness metal is an extremely difficult music genre (and sub genre) to get into, for a start metal is niche and trying to find a decent drummer is like finding a well of gold in your back yard; also to note things like superior drummer only served to make them rarer. A decent 8 piece kit isn't cheap and all the gubbins extra you need for it, they are extremely loud and it's not easy to practice when you have neighbours.. It's one of the most difficult genre's to play, extremely technically involved and requires en mass stamina.. You ever tried to play a two hour set in an extreme metal band? On top of that, with metal being so niche if you decide to waver from popular genre's the chances of being noticed and / or semi-successful is abysmal at best.. It takes a hell of a lot of skill, money, determination and stubbornness to even produce a mediocre demo. On the flip side, metal / rock is mainly made up of guitarists (a lot of them very talented must admit) and the odd basist.. So if you're a half decent metal drummer / singer you can get a band without trying too hard. Our drummer plays double pedal, uses blast beats, and our tempo range is pretty solidly 150-180 BPM dropped tuned arghy-blargy. We're not a hardcore or a metal band, but I don't take tempo as an excuse. You write the songs, you better be able to play them. No one makes you join a Technical Death Metal band. I've also seen a lot of excellent grindcore bands that have been insanely tight, but that, power violence and black metal are really the only metal genres I'm really into in a serious way. The city I live in is the biggest city for metal in Ireland, people travel countrywide to the metal events held here. So from being constantly around it, I think actual metal fans are crying out for innovation. I grew up in an exclusively metal scene and it burnt out because of the amount of same-y sounding bands. I'd have much rathered see metal bands with drum machines, in that genre I still would. I'm obviously playing devil's advocate to some extent - I almost always feel the bands I like that end up making sub standard releases are due to the engineer's influence. But a lot of bands are self sabotaging and in particular with Metal and Hard Rock stuff, the quantity of self sabotaging bands is staggering. They're literally asking people "Make me sound like Alter Bridge/Avenged Sevenfod/Chelsea Grin/Early Trivium" and then complaining when their music washes into the abyss. Wittingly or out of fear these records are designed to be ignored, those artists essentially are the architects of the paradigm they become a victim of. I also understand how insanely conformist the metal music press are, as bad if not worse than the pop punk or pop music press, but that's a terrible reason to make any musical decision. So yeah, we can talk editing but if you want a very specific performance either get the drummer to drum or don't get the drummer to drum. If the performance you want is that of a computer, don't get a drummer. Practice is now 1 person less and the music is now closer to what you want it to be. What's so crazy about that?
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Post by Deleted on Sept 16, 2017 11:10:18 GMT -6
mrholmes Yes, lets not allow interesting topics to organically grow. If only this was a forum to discuss matters of music and recording, oh wait..! jazznoise I'm not really disagreeing with you, I used to love metal and over the course of two decades it's become somewhat white noise. Saying it's "your decision" is like saying the sky is blue, it's obvious but it doesn't stop them doing it en mass. Here's the thing, they only need to crack out superior drummer and a Line 6 device then go for it.. "What's so crazy about that?" You said "Hard Rock and Metal Bands are obsessed with sounding as lame and terrible as possible".. I don't quite understand what the point of your last point is, although my point was doing metal "properly" is an expensive and inconvenient venture that can easily be shunned for many of the reasons you mention. I understand (to an extent) why they do hang onto pre-conceived notions and follow formula's as such.. It's an ironic genre filled full of biasm in what's supposed to be an artistic and expressive medium. It'd be interesting to see how Iron Maiden would do if they were to be released today.. Using the same recording methodologies and programming procedures a lot of times ends up in similar results, can't say I personally love any VST drum software even though I use them a lot.. Don't get me wrong it's a far cry from the original Toontrack released but if you want a track to sound really good, I'd avoid. I suppose it's just like the "prosumer" recording movement, where a track would sound better in the hands of a professional using decent gear but cost / convenience rules the roost.. It's also far easier to "get right". I agree with John, a lot of it's a matter of circumstance.
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Post by mrholmes on Sept 17, 2017 6:41:41 GMT -6
mrholmes Yes, lets not allow interesting topics to organically grow. If only this was a forum to discuss matters of music and recording, oh wait..! If you open a therad to discuss how to deal with fake drums in a modern day prdoucers studio and the discussion starts to go about something else than this - would you like it? I guess no. This is not Gearslutz if you want to discuss Metal Drummers than please open a Metal Drummer therad and move over there. Wait I help you: realgearonline.com/thread/7617/metal-punk-drummers-bands-discuss
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