Pribek

Here now, to start the festivities, is my new official soapbox issue.

Save The Drummers!

Got that? Keep that in mind. Make it a mantra. Save The Drummers! A call to action, a groundswell, a grass roots movement.

If we do this right, if we raise awareness, the solutions to seemingly larger problems will fall in to place.

First order of business, we have to stop the grid. We need to end it now! No more recording of music with grid-based software. No more after the fact editing, shifting the drums around in cyberspace until they sound utterly inhuman. The placement of individual drum hits should be decided by a human being; a drummer. A guy with a wicked foot not a guy with a wicked mouse hand.

Music has three possible elements; melody, harmony and rhythm. The grid effectively destroys any individual performance characteristics of fully 1/3 of the sonic landscape.

You wouldn’t allow that with other things you enjoy. New Cheetos! Featuring 1/3 less flavor! “Ooh baby, when I see you in that red dress, I just want to make love to you 2/3 of the night long.”

The grid and it’s evil sibling, the click, are so prevalent that, generations now, of drummers have come up hearing nothing but perfectly placed percussive strikes. Consequently, the “best” drummers of this age sound like they are on the grid even when they aren’t. Lifeless, boring, stiff.

Also, we must eliminate the click track from live performance. In order to duplicate the sound of the grid, in a live setting, with the illusion of a human element; the drummer has a relentless, cold, fascist clicking sound piped in to his eardrum in order to keep any outburst of percussive creativity subdued. Tempo shall never vary from one performance to the next. All drum performance shall be uniform.

Live has nothing to do with the rhythm of life.

Listening to music has been transformed in to conformism. That’s what’s wrong with the music! The personality, the life, the soul has been sucked out of it! Life is not perfect. Humans aren’t perfect. Tempo, laid down by a human isn’t perfect but, it can make you shake your moneymaker.

Rhythm is the foundation that the house is built on. Sterile drums+brilliant vocal=boring record.

What set you off, Jack?

Thanks for asking. I saw this article over at Music Radar called “18 Steps To The Perfect Sampled Drum Sound”.

Here’s the thing; the evil is a lot worse than most folks are aware of. See, there is a studio trick that’s used on a massive scale. This is the use of sampled drums. Sometimes, the drummer will actually be allowed on the cutting floor. They will let him set up his kit, throw some mics in front of it, get good signals or, as they say, “good drum information” and let the poor sap bash around a bit.

After the drummer leaves, and after all of his performance on each individual drum has been shuffled around to the proper places on the grid, the producers/engineers/editors will then take the sound of each individual percussive device and replace that sound with a drum “sample”. This sample could be one of an actual drum recorded in an ideal environment, it may be one that is lifted from another record or, it can be a digitally manufactured fantasy drum.

So, what we have is a drummer who has had any individual performance characteristics regarding placement of beats removed then, to top it off, stripped of any tonal individuality.

OK, now back to this piece that set me off, “18 Steps To The Perfect Sampled Drum Sound”. I read through the whole deal and here’s the part that should interest someone who is not a musician or recording engineer…

18. Humanise

While using repetitive, consistent drum hits is OK for dance music, if you’re trying to get a more realistic, human-sounding drum part and your sampler has a randomised ’round robin’ feature, use it to cycle through different drum sounds at random. As long as your drum samples are similar-sounding, this trick will enhance the believability of your drum parts. The more drum samples you use, the more convincing the feel. Subtle timing changes to individual hits can enhance the effect.

The whole idea is to fool the listener. Play the listener for a chump and all hail the omniscient grid.

Conformity! That’s what wrecking this joint! Don’t you see it? Don’t you hear it?

Everything is manufactured. Everything is processed. I’m talking food, shelter, water even body parts. Rampant conformism and we all just consume it.

Conformity and art don’t mix.

The antidote in non-conformism. That’s the only way to stop the poison. Are there going to be boundaries for the looming artificial intelligence? Are there personal places it won’t be allowed to touch?

My friends, the sound of the revolution starts with the thunder of the drums!

Save The Drummers!

Our friend J is very astute.

It’s tough to get beginning players to stop worrying with technique issues and to get to that point where the instrument is transparent and the player is shining through. There’s a great deal of “over-learning” that has to take place (IMHO) and not every neophyte survives this trek up the mountain.

Guitar players are guilty of the charges more often than other players because there is more of them. Also, more stuff being sold to them. Technique and tone. Faster and fatter. You take a walk around the various guitar-centered blogs and it gives you a good idea of what guitar players think about. TONE is king. All the gear they are selling carries a promise of the ultimate tone. It’s to the point now where tone seems to be more important than the notes you choose to play.

We all talk about tone for a while then somebody says something like; “well, really tone is in the hands”, and we all say, yeah you are right and call it a night. But, tone isn’t all in the hands, or the instrument, or the amp, or the heart. There are other factors that aren’t part of the general discussion. You look at the big guns, the big tone guys that everybody is trying to emulate, say for instance Eddie Van Halen or, Stevie Ray, or Joe Satriani etc. All of the music around them, what players are playing to support them also enables them that fat tone. And, the microphone, compressor, engineer who equalizes the mix you are hearing have as much to do with the guy’s tone as all of his gear does. So, if you are chasing some guitar sound you hear on a record, and you go buy that guy’s guitar and amp, you still don’t have all the components because you can’t afford to have Eddie Kramer hang out in your living room. And, unless your band is totally in to giving you the right of way, even if you had that tone exactly, it isn’t going to sound the same.

You are better off grabbing a instrument and playing until you have some stuff that you can play so well, that it doesn’t matter what gear you are using. If you have a couple of things that work all the time, licks that you own, then you can do something with ‘em.

How come I don’t hear anybody talking about rhythm tone? That’s what you will be spending most of time doing. All of this tone talk is about soloing. It’s all about “look at me” tone. It’s not about ensemble tone.

There is a finite amount of a given mix. There is 100% of a mix available to all of the cats who show up on a given day. There has to be some effort to leave everybody some space. Think about an instrument that is a single note instrument, like a trumpet. It has a limited range compared to a guitar or piano. Matter of fact, all single note instruments have a limited range compared to guitar and piano. So, when the trumpet is taking a solo, you have to give him the tonal room, his place in the mix. If you are cranking out Eddie’s brown sound, or SRV’s mondo-Dumbleator, stuff that was made to fill up space that wasn’t normally filled by a guitar, you aren’t going to hear that trumpet even though it’s loud as hell.

That’s why John Bonham’s massive kick drum sound only works on certain stuff. If you get that kind of kick drum going, which is one that requires property rights on a bunch of mid frequencies that are inherent to acoustic guitars and piano chords, in a country band, the mix is muddy. When you have Bonham’s big ol’ kick and Jimmy Page’s saturated power chord frenzy going on, the only tonal place left for a singer to occupy is a high pitched nasal place. Most guys that sing high notes with a nasal timbre sound like total crap. Good luck finding that guy because, even though you got a big kick sound and a ginormous power chord going on, nobody wants to hear your rock and roll without a singer.

Maybe, we can tune down to D, sing lower and then we will be able to use these rectifiers to there fullest advantage and still be making popular music. Is it just me or, is anybody else disturbed that all current rock music is exclusively perfect fourth and fifth intervals? Maybe, the odd flat five but, for the most parts guitar music has turned in to the same stuff that monks were singing 1,000 years ago. Everybody got bored with that right? This isn’t going to take a thousand years is it?

I look at these “boutique” amp manufacturers and they all base their products on amps made decades ago that have a narrow frequency range. If you went out and played through a vintage Deluxe with no stomp boxes, it’s going to sound boring to most of you. It doesn’t have near the frequency range or tonal possibilities that you can get with a cheesy multi-effects unit/amp simulator run through your computer and headphones. Just a boring sounding, little tone. But, that’s the “Holy Grail” according to many amp makers.

You got to find gear that works, doesn’t break and you got to learn how to play some stuff. You got to figure out licks or chords that work with other musicians and find a tonal place that fits in to the mix. Whoever is running sound, needs to realize that the old thing about making a smiley face on the EQ, was an idea that was in style before digital and you don’t need to have 20K at a higher level than any frequency. That’s why your stuff is always feeding back, especially your monitors. You don’t need to be giving the biggest part of your mix to dogs. Matter of fact just pull that 20K down past all the others. And, if you are playing with a guy that has a five string bass and, he insists on honking that low B every chance, go find another bunch to play with.

Shania and Mutt are splitting up.

Shania Twain and husband-producer Robert “Mutt” Lange are splitting up after 14 years of marriage. The 42-year-old Canadian country superstar and 59-year-old Lange married in 1993 and have a 6-year-old son named Eja. Her publicist provided no further details Thursday about the couple’s breakup.

I wonder who gets custody of the drum sound?