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BonsaiK

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Nov 14, 2007
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Troels Pleimert said:
Is this thread still alive? I actually do have a question that I feel needs an insider perspective.

I was talking about drums way earlier in the thread and about how hard it is to record them adequately on a shoestring (or a no-shoes) budget.

But I'm starting to wonder whether most professional bands in studios don't just cut corners and program the drums, even if they have a live-and-well drummer.

I'm not talking about when Meshuggah did Catch-22 (using Drums From Hell) or when Devin Townsend dit Ziltoid the Omniscient (also using Drums From Hell). Both of these were up front about using programmed drums.

I'm talking about those bands that PRETEND to use human drums, but by the sound of it probably aren't.

For instance, I'm listening to Paradise Lost's Symbol Of Life, and those drums don't sound real. Neither do the drums on Deadsy's Phantasmagore. And there's an on-going fight among my musically inclined friends (who also do music production on the side) on whether Fear Factory actually recorded Raymond Herrera live for the Demanufacture/Obsolete/Digimortal albums, or if it's actually Rhys Fulber working a drum machine. (One of my friends INSIST that "you cannot play that precise!", and Demanufacture is from 1994, so there wasn't any Beat Detective around back then.)

Peter Steele admitted that all the drums for October Rust, World Coming Down and Life is Killing Me were programmed.

As you can tell, I'm focusing a bit on metal drums, and that's because (in my view, at least) it's not as much of a "faux pas" to use a drum machine and lie about it in other genres, i.e. pop or country. (Jazz, probably, but hey.) Metal drummers are notoriously competitive. Admitting to using a trigger on the bass drums was even a sin once (I remember Nicholas Barker getting flak for it, and he's an awesome drummer notwithstanding!).

I have a feeling A LOT more bands are actually using programmed drums - out of laziness, or because the drummer really isn't that good (most people probably wouldn't notice when playing live that he didn't hit all the notes?), or because it just sounds better?

Does anyone know of any - ANY - albums where you know for a fact that it's a machine playing, even though we all thought it was a human?
Yes, I know quite a few! I'm sworn to secrecy though, but I can give you one example that's very relevant for metal and that crops up a lot:

You've probably noticed if you're a metal drummer or if you've seen a lot of metal drummers play live, that it's really hard to get the volume and speed of a double kick pedal consistent. It's harder to maintain volume when going at speed - a lot of drummers simply don't have the stamina. Few drummers do it really, really well, some might be stronger with one foot than the other, etc. In studios, if the drummer is a bit crap with his pedals, he'll often be overdubbed with bass drum samples from a sample module, but triggered from the actual drum hits, that recreate the hit using the sample at an exact volume each time. If the drummer is also bad with his pedal timing, the entire track may be removed in the mix and replaced with someone (usually the drummer himself) playing drum samples by hitting two keys on a keyboard.

As for Fear Factory's "Demanufacture", what happened there was that the drums were recorded live, then Front Line Assembly's Rhys Fulber came in and re-quantised a lot of the drum hits to square off a lot of the natural "swing" a drummer would put in their playing. FF were quite open about doing this, they did it not to "hide bad drumming" but because they were deliberately going for a squared-off mechanical feel, they wanted the drums to sound less human and more machine-generated, to fit in with the overall feel and theme of that album. I assume they also did the same thing on subsequent albums (Rhys was pretty much 5th member of the band at that point, if I recall correctly) but I'm not sure.

Even when bass drums (or any drums) are recorded live they're often compressed to even out the volumes in a way that makes them sound smoother than a live drummer in your lounge room would sound. Even the standard way of recording a drum kit, with a close mic on the bass, a close mic on the snare etc.... is an artifical creation. There's no way your ears can naturally hear drums in that way. This modified acoustic environment has become the norm. All this can make it really hard to tell a "real" drum recording from a "fake" one, because arguably the "real" one is actually fake, in the sense that it's not actually the natural way drums sound. I could go into more detail here about how gates, compressors etc work if you want, I think you get the basic idea though. Anyway all of the above representes a combination of reasons why a lot of drums on albums seem oddly precise and "smooth"...

Also, I have this thread bookmarked, so it doesn't matter if there's long periods of inactivity here, I'll always see someone posting.
 

Troels Pleimert

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Jul 23, 2010
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Edit: completely forgot to thank you for your response. ;)

And also, express feigned rage towards your secrecy vows. Like, that Arnold Schwarzenegger-side project Austrian Death Machine which claims that dude from As I Lay Dying or whatever played guitar, bass and DRUMS on it. Yeah, guitars and bass, I can see, but DRUMS? No way is he that talented a metal drummer and decides to stick to guitars and singing in his main-emo-band.

Anyway, thank you. :)

BonsaiK said:
*snippetisnip*

If the drummer is also bad with his pedal timing, the entire track may be removed in the mix and replaced with someone (usually the drummer himself) playing drum samples by hitting two keys on a keyboard.
That last approach: One of my drummer friends recorded his band in what basically amounted to a rehearsal space, and he came out with the most amazing drum sound. And I asked him how the hell he had done that, because I *knew* he played the drums for real, and I *knew* they recorded the entire thing live (i.e. all playing at once, and playing without a click track). And also that they didn't have a rig or tons of drum mic's, etc., which is what you'd need to get a professional-sounding track.

(His drums sounded somewhat like Porcupine Tree's drums do on Fear of a Blank Planet; one of my favorite drum sounds ever, where you can hear every nuance and ghost note, but it's still powerful and sounds human.)

He confessed to having taken his recorded drum track, EQ'ed all the bass and midtone out of it, and then tapping in every bass-, snare- and tom-hit on his keyboard.

When I program drums and try to get them to sound real, I end up spending an awful lot of time programming ghost notes and other stuff and little touches that I would normally do behind a drum kit. The way my friend did it, however, makes the track sound 'live' (because you get all the overhead sound and the treble crashes of the cymbals), but the bassdrum and snare still had oomph and power.

I'm not sure that's technically cheating, but I'm putting it up here so others can use it as inspiration if they want a good drum sound that doesn't sound mechanical.
 

BonsaiK

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Nov 14, 2007
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Troels Pleimert said:
Edit: completely forgot to thank you for your response. ;)

And also, express feigned rage towards your secrecy vows. Like, that Arnold Schwarzenegger-side project Austrian Death Machine which claims that dude from As I Lay Dying or whatever played guitar, bass and DRUMS on it. Yeah, guitars and bass, I can see, but DRUMS? No way is he that talented a metal drummer and decides to stick to guitars and singing in his main-emo-band.

Anyway, thank you. :)

BonsaiK said:
*snippetisnip*

If the drummer is also bad with his pedal timing, the entire track may be removed in the mix and replaced with someone (usually the drummer himself) playing drum samples by hitting two keys on a keyboard.
That last approach: One of my drummer friends recorded his band in what basically amounted to a rehearsal space, and he came out with the most amazing drum sound. And I asked him how the hell he had done that, because I *knew* he played the drums for real, and I *knew* they recorded the entire thing live (i.e. all playing at once, and playing without a click track). And also that they didn't have a rig or tons of drum mic's, etc., which is what you'd need to get a professional-sounding track.

(His drums sounded somewhat like Porcupine Tree's drums do on Fear of a Blank Planet; one of my favorite drum sounds ever, where you can hear every nuance and ghost note, but it's still powerful and sounds human.)

He confessed to having taken his recorded drum track, EQ'ed all the bass and midtone out of it, and then tapping in every bass-, snare- and tom-hit on his keyboard.

When I program drums and try to get them to sound real, I end up spending an awful lot of time programming ghost notes and other stuff and little touches that I would normally do behind a drum kit. The way my friend did it, however, makes the track sound 'live' (because you get all the overhead sound and the treble crashes of the cymbals), but the bassdrum and snare still had oomph and power.

I'm not sure that's technically cheating, but I'm putting it up here so others can use it as inspiration if they want a good drum sound that doesn't sound mechanical.
Things like that happen all the time even in good studios. I've seen engineers try and fail to get a decent snare sound out of a rattly piece of shit snare that some poverty-stricken band has brought in, and then just go "fuck it, that snare isn't useable, rather than record it again with the mics in a different spot, or buy new drums heads, we'll use the snare as a sample trigger, leave a little of the original sound in there just so it still sounds natural and patch in some other snare drum from my vast library of snare sounds on this here sample CD". Whether it's "cheating" or not only matters if drummers are snobby and getting precious about their egos (often they are, so it's actually industry standard practice to not tell the drummer that this is happening). The rest of the band and the audience doesn't care, all they want is a kick-ass sound.
 

Troels Pleimert

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BonsaiK said:
Whether it's "cheating" or not only matters if drummers are snobby and getting precious about their egos (often they are, so it's actually industry standard practice to not tell the drummer that this is happening). The rest of the band and the audience doesn't care, all they want is a kick-ass sound.
On my ass laughing at the poor, delusions-of-grandeur drummer douche in the sound booth, listening back to his kick-ass sounding drums, going "Fuck yeah!", not realizing the engineer is snickering behind his back that most of the track is running off an EzDrummer-patch he has carefully hidden behind the main window. ;)

EDIT: I forgot to address the whole "cheating" situation. Just like any guitarist would probably be at least mildly upset to see himself get replaced with that fucking FruityLoops-guitar (what's it called? "Shred"?), any drummer who's told he's not "quite in tempo, we'll have to quantize this" is probably a little hurt. That said, you're totally right - the end result is about getting an awesome drum sound and that's that.

But if you're touting your drummer as the next coming of Christ behind the kit and it turns out it's a machine playing (even though he does it live on tour), that's still something of a kick in the balls for the devoted fan, I'd think.

BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED POST:

I'm thinking of getting myself an electronic drum kit instead of all his tedious mucking about with mic's. One that plugs right into EzDrummer would eliminate all the bullshit AND I'd be able to quantize the drums in Ableton afterwards, because they'd come in as MIDI data. That's totally cheating and I don't care.
 

BonsaiK

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Nov 14, 2007
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Shivarage said:
Do you personally like pop music?
Some of it I do, most of it I don't. But then I could say the same for rock, rap, heavy metal, reggae, industrial, classical, jazz, [insert your favourite genre here]... I wouldn't say I like any one particular style more than any other these days. Any type of music has the potential to be something I'm interested in if it's done well.
 

Shivarage

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BonsaiK said:
Some of it I do, most of it I don't. But then I could say the same for rock, rap, heavy metal, reggae, industrial, classical, jazz, [insert your favourite genre here]... I wouldn't say I like any one particular style more than any other these days. Any type of music has the potential to be something I'm interested in if it's done well.
Ah, sturgeons law xP

What kind of perks are there to being a successful musician? (since we now know the downsides xP)
 

BonsaiK

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Nov 14, 2007
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Shivarage said:
BonsaiK said:
Some of it I do, most of it I don't. But then I could say the same for rock, rap, heavy metal, reggae, industrial, classical, jazz, [insert your favourite genre here]... I wouldn't say I like any one particular style more than any other these days. Any type of music has the potential to be something I'm interested in if it's done well.
Ah, sturgeons law xP

What kind of perks are there to being a successful musician? (since we now know the downsides xP)
If you're really successful, and your contract doesn't suck, the money has the potential to be good when you finally do get paid. Being paid to play music is better than being paid to dig a ditch somewhere. You get to meet lots of unique and interesting people and have adventures, some good, some bad but all something to remember when you're on your deathbed. You'll find it a lot easier to meet new people. Great way to overcome shyness. Your sex life won't suffer for it. Every day is casual Friday. People are giving you free shit all the time. Great bragging rights. They're the main ones.

The list of negatives is a lot longer.
 

BonsaiK

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Nov 14, 2007
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Ham_authority95 said:
Is there a scientific reason why distorted guitars have stuck around for so long in popular music?
I don't know about "scientific" as in "it tickes part x of the brain" or whatever, that's a bit beyond my field. What I can say, however, is that distorted guitars are very practical and easy to record.

When the distorted guitar effect was first discovered, by either overdriving tube amplifiers or overloading the input on mixing boards, engineers treated it as a mistake and something to be removed if it ever appeared in a recording. That changed in the 1960s with guitarists experimenting with "fuzz pedals". Now of course it's commonplace.

What a distortion pedal actually does is pump the volume circuits with "too much" signal and the resulting effect is the breakup of the sound, so instead of getting more volume, you get the sound of the circuit spazzing out (this is a very oversimplified explanation). What this means is that distortion works as a compressor or limiter - it evens out volume discrepancies - a note hit softly and a note hit hard will come out at more or less the same volume. This makes any distorted instrument really easy to record, because you always know at exactly what volume it's going to be. No doubt this has helped its popularity, but I'd still say that the main reason is that people just like that overdriven, out-of-control sound.
 

Shivarage

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BonsaiK said:
If you're really successful, and your contract doesn't suck, the money has the potential to be good when you finally do get paid. Being paid to play music is better than being paid to dig a ditch somewhere. You get to meet lots of unique and interesting people and have adventures, some good, some bad but all something to remember when you're on your deathbed. You'll find it a lot easier to meet new people. Great way to overcome shyness. Your sex life won't suffer for it. Every day is casual Friday. People are giving you free shit all the time. Great bragging rights. They're the main ones.

The list of negatives is a lot longer.
The list of negatives would be good for reality check :)
 

BonsaiK

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Nov 14, 2007
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Shivarage said:
BonsaiK said:
If you're really successful, and your contract doesn't suck, the money has the potential to be good when you finally do get paid. Being paid to play music is better than being paid to dig a ditch somewhere. You get to meet lots of unique and interesting people and have adventures, some good, some bad but all something to remember when you're on your deathbed. You'll find it a lot easier to meet new people. Great way to overcome shyness. Your sex life won't suffer for it. Every day is casual Friday. People are giving you free shit all the time. Great bragging rights. They're the main ones.

The list of negatives is a lot longer.
The list of negatives would be good for reality check :)
Sorry for delay, been busy.

It's hard to make a start. It's really hard to make a start. Expect lots of shitkicking jobs for literally no pay. If you do have any success, it comes with massive amounts of envy and certainly not the praise and adulation many expect. Even when successful the money is good but usually isn't as good as you might think. You'll have trouble discerning who your friends are and who is just being friendly with ulterior motives. Drug use is so common that it's basically the norm, and not talking about recreational occasional use here, and the few scenes that don't have drugs have rabid pseudo-religious fanaticism instead. Violence also common in some circles. Business attracts all sorts of mentally ill people in it for all the wrong reasons. Nobody is reliable. Contracts are crap. Clients are frequently deadbeat. General mistrust of everyone around you in the business has the potential to influence your personal life negatively, including relationships etc. Industry on a downturn generally, and has been for decades, which means intense competition for the few jobs that exist, as demand > supply this drives wages down. Moral flexibility required to deal with the inner workings of an industry a stone's throw away from drug dealing and prostitution is too much for many. High suicide risk across the board especially for aforementioned mentally ill people. Having a girl/boyfriend/partner willing to put up with you while you deal with all the above is rare.
 

BonsaiK

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Nov 14, 2007
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Ham_authority95 said:
How many shy musicians do you know?
A great deal, in fact most of them are shy. The person who is outgoing both onstage and off is the exception rather than the rule. A lot of people who are attracted to performing are actually doing it in part to battle their own problems with overcoming shyness, by confronting their fears head-on. I include myself here, I used to be very shy and I certainly used performing at one time as a device to help get myself out of my own shell. I've seen it work for others too, not just musicians... I know a girl who is a stripper for the same reason.
 

Shivarage

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BonsaiK said:
Sorry for delay, been busy.

It's hard to make a start. It's really hard to make a start. Expect lots of shitkicking jobs for literally no pay. If you do have any success, it comes with massive amounts of envy and certainly not the praise and adulation many expect. Even when successful the money is good but usually isn't as good as you might think. You'll have trouble discerning who your friends are and who is just being friendly with ulterior motives. Drug use is so common that it's basically the norm, and not talking about recreational occasional use here, and the few scenes that don't have drugs have rabid pseudo-religious fanaticism instead. Violence also common in some circles. Business attracts all sorts of mentally ill people in it for all the wrong reasons. Nobody is reliable. Contracts are crap. Clients are frequently deadbeat. General mistrust of everyone around you in the business has the potential to influence your personal life negatively, including relationships etc. Industry on a downturn generally, and has been for decades, which means intense competition for the few jobs that exist, as demand > supply this drives wages down. Moral flexibility required to deal with the inner workings of an industry a stone's throw away from drug dealing and prostitution is too much for many. High suicide risk across the board especially for aforementioned mentally ill people. Having a girl/boyfriend/partner willing to put up with you while you deal with all the above is rare.
hmm, I wasn't notified... strange :/

Do you mean "demand < supply drives wages down" or am I missing something? D:

What keeps you sane personally?
 

BonsaiK

Music Industry Corporate Whore
Nov 14, 2007
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Shivarage said:
BonsaiK said:
Sorry for delay, been busy.

It's hard to make a start. It's really hard to make a start. Expect lots of shitkicking jobs for literally no pay. If you do have any success, it comes with massive amounts of envy and certainly not the praise and adulation many expect. Even when successful the money is good but usually isn't as good as you might think. You'll have trouble discerning who your friends are and who is just being friendly with ulterior motives. Drug use is so common that it's basically the norm, and not talking about recreational occasional use here, and the few scenes that don't have drugs have rabid pseudo-religious fanaticism instead. Violence also common in some circles. Business attracts all sorts of mentally ill people in it for all the wrong reasons. Nobody is reliable. Contracts are crap. Clients are frequently deadbeat. General mistrust of everyone around you in the business has the potential to influence your personal life negatively, including relationships etc. Industry on a downturn generally, and has been for decades, which means intense competition for the few jobs that exist, as demand > supply this drives wages down. Moral flexibility required to deal with the inner workings of an industry a stone's throw away from drug dealing and prostitution is too much for many. High suicide risk across the board especially for aforementioned mentally ill people. Having a girl/boyfriend/partner willing to put up with you while you deal with all the above is rare.
hmm, I wasn't notified... strange :/

Do you mean "demand < supply drives wages down" or am I missing something? D:

What keeps you sane personally?
No, not a typo. I meant demand > supply = lower wages as in "demand for jobs", not "demand for product". To rephrase, because there is a greater demand for work in the music industry than there are supply of jobs to go around, potential employees compete for each other for positions and this drives down wages, as whoever is hiring can pick and choose between many options so why would they pick the most expensive option unless they're guaranteed extra returns. This is why gigs for original bands pay like shit, this wasn't always the way but with more bands active now than ever before, and many willing to play for little or nothing (and some clueless suckers even willing to pay to play) who is going to hire the band that demands a $1000 guarantee, unless they know that band can absolutely pull a crowd? Same effect happening across the board in the music industry, and the same principle also applies to any other "glamour industry" job like acting, writing and so forth where everybody with an ego wants to do it but only a few realistically can with any effectiveness for various reasons.

What keeps me sane is not drinking, smoking, doing drugs or being around anyone who I don't want to be around any more than I have to. Not always an easy thing to achieve but I think I manage better than most. I'm very blunt with people who I'd rather not deal with.
 

BonsaiK

Music Industry Corporate Whore
Nov 14, 2007
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Ham_authority95 said:
Have you ever made music for video games before? If so, is there any advice you can give for it?
I made a bunch of music for a Korean adventure game once. The guys took the music and went back to Korea with it, so I don't know where my music is now or even if the game came out at all. I made a "main theme" with an epic kind of vibe, a "pastoral home town" theme, a few "fight" themes, a "creepy suspense" theme and a few other variations, all of them for orchestral instruments, no modern stuff because it was a D&D style fantasy-realm type game. Writing for computer games is like writing for film, but easier because you don't have to synchronise the music with the action most of the time (the programmers do that for you), you just need to make the music easily loopable and not too annoying to hear in repetition. It's all about setting the right moods and having melodies and sounds that don't annoy. I didn't find it too difficult, but then I didn't find it too profitable either. It was good fun to do once as something different but I doubt I'd want to do it all the time, it's essentially not very different to working for advertising companies, writing jingles, except you're expected to produce more stuff and you generally get paid less.
 

Shivarage

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BonsaiK said:
No, not a typo. I meant demand > supply = lower wages as in "demand for jobs", not "demand for product". To rephrase, because there is a greater demand for work in the music industry than there are supply of jobs to go around, potential employees compete for each other for positions and this drives down wages, as whoever is hiring can pick and choose between many options so why would they pick the most expensive option unless they're guaranteed extra returns. This is why gigs for original bands pay like shit, this wasn't always the way but with more bands active now than ever before, and many willing to play for little or nothing (and some clueless suckers even willing to pay to play) who is going to hire the band that demands a $1000 guarantee, unless they know that band can absolutely pull a crowd? Same effect happening across the board in the music industry, and the same principle also applies to any other "glamour industry" job like acting, writing and so forth where everybody with an ego wants to do it but only a few realistically can with any effectiveness for various reasons.

What keeps me sane is not drinking, smoking, doing drugs or being around anyone who I don't want to be around any more than I have to. Not always an easy thing to achieve but I think I manage better than most. I'm very blunt with people who I'd rather not deal with.
Whats the average retirement age for a band then? o_O or do some quit while they are ahead while others just keep going?

Do you ever fear pissing off the wrong person?
 

BonsaiK

Music Industry Corporate Whore
Nov 14, 2007
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Shivarage said:
Whats the average retirement age for a band then? o_O or do some quit while they are ahead while others just keep going?

Do you ever fear pissing off the wrong person?
1. Usually "when we realise we're not going to get anywhere", or "when it's not fun anymore", whatever comes first. Bands who get dumped from labels after only marginal success tend to quit shortly afterward, figuring "we had our shot" and also because they may be in debt and resigning often means then collecting another debt to pay. Also, bands do get sick of the lifestyle, touring, etc - it's not something everyone can maintain for a long period.

2. No. I make an effort to maintain good relationships with people who I know I can trust, the rest of them I don't worry about. You can't spend too much time thinking about that kind of stuff or it'll drive you insane. Fact is not everyone is going to like you so just be true to yourself and try not to be a douche and mostly people will return the favour.