Fake drums are sounding very real

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theblackBay said:
This whole "Real" Drums "Fake" drums thing has got me a little confused?

it does not matter what "Drum software program" is being use so long as it maps the trigger information to the actual sample?

now how is anyone’s 24bit recorded instance of say… a snare "real" and the 24bit Recorded instance of the snare sample that was recorded then(when the sample was made) "fake"?

here's my story (I’m not mentioning names) i was doing some "drum tech" with a Drummer that has recorded with some of the biggest name artist in the world and he was showing me some things he spent a lot of time setting the mics and etc the OH the Room mic etc.

then we tracked a beat and were in the control room when i had an awakening moment.

he was talking about separation and gating and he said "or instead of gating you could just cut each instance of the sample to where you want it"... then he thought a little more and said “actually what everyone does is cut the instance and then re-copy it along the track to save time.

to which i said "but isn't that just exactly the same as using a sample?" and he said "yeah pretty much" and said "so what about variance in the velocity" and he said "well you can get software to do all that now anyhow."

too which i said nothing.. let me tell you this is a guy that says if it's not analogue and in a studio costing at least $5000 per piece of gear it's not Real gear ... but these comments and the irony of setting up the drum mics to copy paste a single instance or variances of them was completely lost on him.

so get any drum Program (as long as it meets a few now basic minimum requirements) as long as your Samples were 24bit Professionally recorded who cares?

Want best of both worlds? get Drum software that you can include your own "real" drum samples that you recorded. set up one day record all the samples in different ways and velocities and then incorporate them into your drum software.

now you have your own drumkit in the software.
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You're not seriously confused as to the difference, are you?

On one hand you have a performance with all it's dynamics - warts and all.

On the other hand you have bits of someone else's work that you've cut up and are using to cobble together something that resembles a performance. It isn't. If it was, why did you need to talk to a drummer who has worked with some of the biggest names in the world? In fact, why in the hell would anybody hire him when they can just use fruity loops?

I may have to roll over and use samples at some point, but nobody will accuse me of not knowing the difference.

The fake drums are sounding pretty good, though.

I'm staying and building a live room.
 
ive tried ezdrummer and drumkit from hell and all that and i just dont like the samples

i couldnt find any snares that i liked

they sound too high-pitched to me and not enough snare

some of the cymbals sounded good but i didnt like the hats very much

ive had a number of drumkits over the years and ive spent a lot of time on tuning and setting the snares up the way i like them

my ultimate would be to have a nice kit in a decent room and make my own samples for each tune with grace notes and rolls done to tempo

maybe entire fills done to tempo and then trimmed for use as samples

ive bought sample sets on ebay for less than 10 bucks that have some stuff i like better than drumkit from hell

a lot better
 
Supercreep said:
You're not seriously confused as to the difference, are you?

On one hand you have a performance with all it's dynamics - warts and all.

On the other hand you have bits of someone else's work that you've cut up and are using to cobble together something that resembles a performance. It isn't. If it was, why did you need to talk to a drummer who has worked with some of the biggest names in the world? In fact, why in the hell would anybody hire him when they can just use fruity loops?

I may have to roll over and use samples at some point, but nobody will accuse me of not knowing the difference.

The fake drums are sounding pretty good, though.

I'm staying and building a live room.
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The problem is, half the time - the drummers parts are cut and pasted. I know a sound engineer who works in ProTools (and makes a ton of money btw) and he literally cuts and pastes entire drumtracks. He finds one snare sound he likes, and lays it in over every snare strike.

Essentially eliminating the drummer that recorded the part.

My thinking is - if these guys are going to do this crap, why don't they just build a MIDI Drum map and use samples to begin with? It just doesn't make sense to me to actually cut and paste every snare strike.

I mean - that literally eliminates any dynamics in that part.



Tim
 
Tim Brown said:
The problem is, half the time - the drummers parts are cut and pasted. I know a sound engineer who works in ProTools (and makes a ton of money btw) and he literally cuts and pastes entire drumtracks. He finds one snare sound he likes, and lays it in over every snare strike.

Essentially eliminating the drummer that recorded the part.

My thinking is - if these guys are going to do this crap, why don't they just build a MIDI Drum map and use samples to begin with? It just doesn't make sense to me to actually cut and paste every snare strike.

I mean - that literally eliminates any dynamics in that part.



Tim
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Very true. On many commercial records, the drums are so processed/edited/drumagog'ed/quantized that it might as well be samples.

The humanize feature on stuff like EZ drummer has some interesting and often unintended results.:D Since I am not a drummer and not a "drum guy" in general, I can honestly say that I usually cannot tell the difference between EZ drummers and real drummers on slickly produced recordings. I could in the 80s when it was quite obvious, but not today.
 
Why not use drum replacement stuff like drumagog. Use current mics to capture velocity of the hit and the sound and the drum replacement program will do the rest? I played around with one of the free programs and it was kinda cool for the kick. You do however have to make sure there is not too much bleed but I think that might work for ya.
 
quality of these things are pretty good..i love dfh ez drummer...im thinking about getting an electronic drum set with midi(not focusing on the module..more just the pads) and using them to control the drum sounds..
 
Greg_L said:
I believe it. I've been doing some research. I'm now convinced that every good drum sound I've ever heard is a fraud. :mad:
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The sound isn't fraudulent, it's still a great sound. You just made the mistake thinking that it was made by sticking a mic in front of real drums.
 
Farview said:
The sound isn't fraudulent, it's still a great sound. You just made the mistake thinking that it was made by sticking a mic in front of real drums.
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at least, at that exact moment. Its usually a real kit and real mics, but just played some other time. Probably another song to. :D
 
Farview said:
The sound isn't fraudulent, it's still a great sound. You just made the mistake thinking that it was made by sticking a mic in front of real drums.
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It's depressing to think that professional drummers with damn near unlimited resources can't get a good drum sound from their own drums and a microphone. The drums become a prop. Something to look at. They could sit back there with tupperware containers and triggers and sound just like the record. :rolleyes: :p
 
Greg_L said:
It's depressing to think that professional drummers with damn near unlimited resources can't get a good drum sound from their own drums and a microphone. The drums become a prop. Something to look at. They could sit back there with tupperware containers and triggers and sound just like the record. :rolleyes: :p
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Shut up and go double your kick...:p
 
Greg_L said:
It's depressing to think that professional drummers with damn near unlimited resources can't get a good drum sound from their own drums and a microphone. The drums become a prop. Something to look at. They could sit back there with tupperware containers and triggers and sound just like the record. :rolleyes: :p
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Getting a good drum sound normally isn't a problem. Getting a super over-the-top, larger-than-life
drum sound that some productions require is a much bigger trick.
 
Farview said:
Getting a good drum sound normally isn't a problem. Getting a super over-the-top, larger-than-life
drum sound that some productions require is a much bigger trick.
Click to expand...

We were having that conversation over at the gearslutz site and I couldn't get one guy to understand what you just stated.

He also didn't understand that in many (probably most) cases, you're using the sample to augment the original sound.

Also, even if you're replacing a kit entirely you still have the original sounds in the overheads and room mics.

Without triggering everything with electronic drums there is no completely getting rid of the original sounds. You can minimize their effect on the final product, but they will still have some effect. In my opinion that is the best/only reason to not record with electronic drums when going for an over the top sound that is augmented, or replaced. It gives a hint of dynamics and a more human feel.
 
Greg_L said:
It's depressing to think that professional drummers with damn near unlimited resources can't get a good drum sound from their own drums and a microphone. The drums become a prop. Something to look at. They could sit back there with tupperware containers and triggers and sound just like the record. :rolleyes: :p
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I don't know.... I've got an older ddrum2 system, and to be quite honest it sounds very much like a real kit.... I bought it specifically for live use.

Think about it - you get a perfectly clean drum sound live, and at the level of bands like Kiss, or Manowar - you can have your own sounds created and stored so you are actually trigger sounds you created.

The best live drum sound I can think of is on Manowar's Hell on Stage double-CD, it is simply amazing man. Tight, Fat, and in your face. I just wish they would use that particular sound on their studio recordings.

I thought this was hilarious....it's them doing "Lady Marmalade" live in France.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wn7enWeH-EI


Tim
 
Supercreep said:
On one hand you have a performance with all it's dynamics - warts and all.
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Programs like drumagog will keep the performance and dynamics exactly how they are. With a good sample set, there are enough velocity layers and alternate hits to make it not sound like a drum machine.

One of the big advantages to using Drumagog is that you have better control over the dynamics. You can stick a compressor in the chain before Drumagog, so you can even out the dynamics without compressing the snare sound you are hearing. This is especially useful in dense mixes and/or large productions where the drummer wasn't aware of how many instruments he was competing with, and therefore played with dynamics that were too wide for the end result.
 
Tim Brown said:
The best live drum sound I can think of is on Manowar's Hell on Stage double-CD, it is simply amazing man. Tight, Fat, and in your face. I just wish they would use that particular sound on their studio recordings.

Tim
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I did pre-production on that CD. The thing with Manowar is that they change equipment constantly. I can't even be sure what unit they were using at the time, it was either the latest Ddrum unit or the Boom Theory brain. (Space Muffins) Scott Columbus comes up with those sounds himself.

The sounds on the studio albums that came out after that really aren't that different. It's just that a different guy mixed it for a different production style in a different era.

All the Manowar albums from 'Fighting the World' up to today all sound the same, yet they don't sound the same... If you know what I mean.
 
Farview said:
I did pre-production on that CD. The thing with Manowar is that they change equipment constantly. I can't even be sure what unit they were using at the time, it was either the latest Ddrum unit or the Boom Theory brain. (Space Muffins) Scott Columbus comes up with those sounds himself.

The sounds on the studio albums that came out after that really aren't that different. It's just that a different guy mixed it for a different production style in a different era.

All the Manowar albums from 'Fighting the World' up to today all sound the same, yet they don't sound the same... If you know what I mean.
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I know what you mean - on the last 2 releases, the drums were a bit higher in pitch than I personally like.
But MAN do I hate the drum sound on "Fighting the World" - it's like they tried to get the "Creatures of the Night" drum sound
from Kiss to the "nth degree", but they have way too much "boom" on the Kicks - the Kicks just didn't have any KICK to them - the same for "Kings of Metal".

What is funny, is my favorite Manowar album of all time is still "Into Glory Ride" and most fans don't even like that one - but I love the songs on it, and I love the sound - it's really a gloom & doom sounding release, and the drum sound is just really heavy sounding. I also really liked the drum sound on "Louder than Hell" which sounds like the definitely mic'd the 28" kick drums in the studio....because it has the "subsonic" kind of low end that you get from a 28" tuned really low.


I'm not sure what he used on that live CD, but I talked to Al Adinolfi one time about triggering and interfaces, and I didn't say a word about Manowar, and he was like,"I did some work for Scott Columbus from Manowar recently..." and told me that they seemed to be way ahead of the pack when it came to electronics.


They are still my favorite metal band after all these years. I love the latest release - I just wish Joey would save all the Orchestral stuff and release an Orchestral CD of it on his own - I realize he's trying to pay homage to his heroes, such as Wagner but, sadly, it's lost on most beer drinking metal heads.:rolleyes:
You can't force culture on people who are resistant to it.
:p


Heck, I wish they would re-record the first CD with the current line up.

I like Karl's playing, but I definitely miss Ross the Boss.

I tried to get some info out of Dawk about Scott's live drum sound and what he was using, but after talking to him - I don't think he actually had much to do with the drum electronics other than doing a little trigger customization for them.

I'm still considering building a custom snare with integrated triggers and sending it to Scott as a gift.
:D

I've got a trigger design that nobody seems to have marketed yet, and I'm working on a prototype snare. if the thing pans out, I'm definitely going to send him one, since he was my main inspiration for getting into electronics early on.
What I thought was funny was one time on one of the live boards somebody was talking about having a monster PA system and one of Manowar's soundmen was there and he was like, "Manowar uses more power than that just for the drum monitors." LOL



Tim
 
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