Drum replacement ....its stupid!

D

dreib

Active member
Whats up?? Its been awhile, I still check in but I am really busy during the summers..any hoo..

If you're gonna beat detective the life out of it, or whatever its called now , and use samples why even have the drummer show up?? Maybe to play the cymbals ??

I only ask because on my morning jogs I keep hearing bands that have drums that are so fake its not even funny!! Do bands like 5 finger death punch actually have a real live/life drummer? Do they make him sit down and play in the studio? How does it work now ...??

Its so bad I am tempted to switch to a classic rock station just to hear some real instruments .....
 
Haha, you aint wrong.

The real drummer plays in the studio, then his tracks are sliced, diced, quantized, and sample replaced so you basically don't hear anything that was actually done. I don't quite understand why professional bands in professional studios do this. I mean, they *should* be skilled enough to to perform well, and capture that performance well.

In the home studio world, very few people are skilled enough to perform well and/or capture a performance well, so they go the easy route and just fake everything.


IMO, YMMV.
 
dreib said:
I would love to hear a before and after.
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I don't know why you're listening to five finger death punch anyway, but in any case I'd bet he's actually a very good drummer that is just another modern commercial bro-metal casualty of modern commercial bro-metal studio techniques. He probably has no say in the matter.
 
Greg_L said:
I don't know why you're listening to five finger death punch anyway, but in any case I'd bet he's actually a very good drummer that is just another modern commercial bro-metal casualty of modern commercial bro-metal studio techniques. He probably has no say in the matter.
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+1.
I recently witnessed a guy recording real drums in a good room with great gear, then beat detective and sample replace the whole thing.
I don't get it for the majority of music but I do kinda get it in those extreme metal genres because that's just what they (seem to) do.

I guess it's no different to autotune. Singers used to be good; They had to be.
Then you could tune singers to sound good and 'fool' everyone.

Now they seem to tune everyone because that unnatural sound is expected, whether they're good or not. :facepalm:

I don't like it but I guess that certain sound and unnatural accuracy is part of the genre?
 
dreib said:
Whats up?? Its been awhile, I still check in but I am really busy during the summers..any hoo..

If you're gonna beat detective the life out of it, or whatever its called now , and use samples why even have the drummer show up?? Maybe to play the cymbals ??

I only ask because on my morning jogs I keep hearing bands that have drums that are so fake its not even funny!! Do bands like 5 finger death punch actually have a real live/life drummer? Do they make him sit down and play in the studio? How does it work now ...??

Its so bad I am tempted to switch to a classic rock station just to hear some real instruments .....
Click to expand...


I sample the kit drum by drum and replace with those samples. It clears up the drum mix so much and you don't have to try to gate everything out of those toms.
I think the real issue is the use of impossible sounding samples. Of course, metal has always had a problem with reality in my opinion.
 
They do it just because they can. And then the next producer has to do it too, because all the others are doing it. And listeners who expect the next song to sound just like the last one get used to it. In their minds that's how drums are supposed to sound. Or so goes the conventional wisdom. It's like pitch correction--a generation of listeners doesn't know how real vocals sound.
 
We have a drummer but for our current recording project (doing it ourselves for as cheap as we can) we are using addictive drums, we're fairly happy with the results but would much prefer to record our drummer playing a take, it's financial constraints that are stopping us. We have to mess up the original track quite a bit to get the feel we want, our stuff just doesn't sound right when everything is bang on the beat
 
I don't do drum replacement all that much.
It's either my drummer playing...or I may work up a drum MIDI groove when he's not available.

I think if you have a drummer that can play, and a decent kit/room setup...it is kinda stupid to replace everything.
That said...I have a song that my drummer played on, and everything is good, but after doing the rough mixes, I'm finding that the Snare sound is just too hard/too bold for the song.
During tracking, the drums sounded fine, including the Snare...but as more tracks were added and the mix developed...I was wishing the Snare was a bit softer...not so much the velocity, rather just the sound of it. IOW...we could have used a different Snare.
So...I may just go ahead and sample-replace that sucker...since we are not going to re-track the whole kit.
 
I have a drum line that a drummer in Idaho built for one of my songs. I can't play it. It's way over my head. He's not available to do the work. I listened to the original recording of what he did and built my own midi groove based on his playing. No matter how hard I try, it don't fly like him live.

When I put the song in the Clinic everyone said the drums sounded too busy. I had to pull out a lot of his riffs and even some of the basic beat to get it to sound reasonable, but the original midi was spot on as close as I could get to the original...THERE IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR A GOOD DRUMMER.
 
Greg_L said:
I don't know why you're listening to five finger death punch anyway, but in any case I'd bet he's actually a very good drummer that is just another modern commercial bro-metal casualty of modern commercial bro-metal studio techniques. He probably has no say in the matter.
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I am listening to a radio station called 93x out of Minneapolis just to keep in touch with what is new but also play like older AC/DC and the like .

I like listening to all kinds of music but these drum tracks for some of these bands are so fake ....I would personally be embarrassed if I tracked my own drums and they got turned into what I have been hearing .

I know not all bands do it , for example I really dig the band Royal Blood , the drums on those tracks are real .......at least I think so!!
 
dreib said:
I know not all bands do it , for example I really dig the band Royal Blood , the drums on those tracks are real .......at least I think so!!
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That's what depresses me the most about today's music. You can't even make a statement like that for certain anymore. :(
 
famous beagle said:
That's what depresses me the most about today's music. You can't even make a statement like that for certain anymore. :(
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I agree. I don't really subscribe to the "if it sounds good it is good" mantra. I think that's half-assed and a defeatist way to do things. I get it, and it has merit to a point, but I want to believe that what I'm hearing really happened. There are so many tricks and lies in modern music that they've become the norm. It's killing the art and skill of capturing an actual sound with an actual microphone. Why even bother with talent, good sounding equipment, or proper miking when you're just gonna fake it anyway? Tune the drums? Mic them well? Fuck that. That takes time, skill, and energy. Aint nobody got time for that. Just sample replace them. How did anyone ever manage to record music without drum samples, guitar sims, and autotune? It's mind boggling.

IMO, YMMV.
 
dreib said:
I know not all bands do it , for example I really dig the band Royal Blood , the drums on those tracks are real .......at least I think so!!
Click to expand...
I just listened to a few of the songs, Figure it Out is pretty obviously samples. Some of the other tunes were harder to tell, especially since they did some percussion overdubbing.
 
I know of a few modern metal bands (and a ton of local ones) that don't even play the drums OR the bass. They literally just MIDI map the entire song for both of those and then sample the drums (including cymbals) and use a VST for bass (usually something called ZomBass is the popular thing for the locals anyway).

They then use DI guitars and amp sims for guitar tones and quantize all of that to the grid. Only thing "real" and recorded traditionally on their albums is vocals, only because you can't DI a vocal. Even then, the vocals are processed to all hell and back. It gets pretty boring to hear everyone in town with the same guitar tones, same bass tones, and same drum tones, just a different vocalist. They could all be the same band with just a different vocalist featuring.
 
It's also pretty popular to sample the guy's amp with a Kemper and just use that with the DI'd guitars.
 
Drum samples to augment the actual recorded drums is common place so there should be no surprise with that. However, out-and-out drum replacement, with limited exception, is more a result of poor tracking (which may be a result of a host of reasons). If your drummer sucks, and you need to use midi, get a new drummer. If you have a good drummer and their drums sound like crap get a new tracking engineer. or new record in a different studio.
 
I think it's more to do with commercial pressures and control from labels/management - the idea that to be competetive an album has to sound a certain way, rather than something under the control of bands.
I met a guy recently who drums in a band on Road Runner Records. They went into the studio with big(ish) name producer - the guy said 'this is how it's gonna sound' when they'd recorded the album and from what he said I think they felt that it was slightly out of their hands. I guess the label must have chosen the producer/mix engineer well for the bands sound because he likes the album, but I can imagine situations where the band isnt on board but has to go along with it anyway, because contracts.

In my opinion (from what I have seen etc) the further you go from a major label roster, the more likely you are to hear natural drums.
 
The further you go from label rosters, the less budget you have in order to.pay someone to rework everything.

It is all a bit silly, but it is what people are used to hearing now. Case in point: there are a group of people at work that listen to reggae. When some of the older stuff comes on, it drives me nuts because the timing is so loose and the vocals are out of tune.

I'm sure some of that is because I spend so much time fixing timing and tuning problems that I've trained myself to notice these things, but it is sad that I have a hard time listening to an actual performance that was deemed good enough to release and is still being played three decades later.
 
I've read, as early as the 70's many of the live albums replaced or added drums in the studio to give them more substance/punch.
 
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