Panterachat

are triggered or not?

I looked up Aurora Borealis based on a post in the Get Metal thread. Found this video on the setup and playing of the drums, real gearhead studio shit. But the producer was cocky almost to a fuck you feel discussing how he planned to trigger the bass drums.

On one hand purists will say if you didn't "play it" then you suck, it's not real music...etc.

But as you can see, their drummer CAN play. And being that this is the final version of the music, that everybody will hear, fans and prospective fans, rather than waste studio time ($$$!) and possibly have inconsistent sound on record, I guess it makes sense to trigger some things. Especially mundane shit like kick drums. IF he CAN hit them that fast? Who cares if the resulting sound is triggered to sound "even"?

But where does that stop, I guess? IS there something to be said for having those inconsistencies and thus a more "human" sound and feel on record?

If you're hitting it and it makes a sound you like, that's really all that matters at the end of the day. Though I do feel that anyone using them purely for speed purposes (aka they don't have the chops to play with the required power at whatever speed so it's on like a hair-trigger sensitivity) is an absolute pussy... if you can't do it legitimately, practice until you can or fuck off.

I like it better when there are between 1-3 mics used on the whole drumset and that's it

Cheyenne fucking Buffet wrote: Though I do feel that anyone using them purely for speed purposes (aka they don't have the chops to play with the required power at whatever speed so it's on like a hair-trigger sensitivity) is an absolute pussy... if you can't do it legitimately, practice until you can or fuck off.

Here, here!

tacos wrote:I like it better when there are between 1-3 mics used on the whole drumset and that's it

I agree with this and not just because you're tacos

Although Nick Barker's kit sounds badass, it's all triggers. Look how he barely hits the bass drum.

That is exactly what I'm talking about. Someone should force him to play mic-less at a bar somewhere. Nobody would hear shit.

Consider without triggering a lot of drums are compressed as fuck these days so that differences in dynamics are all smoothed out anyway.

"Perfect" sounding drums sound fucking stale to me. Listen to old Zeppelin records and Bonham's foot is far from perfectly static with every hit, but it sure sounds a lot more interesting than this overcompressed drum sound we hear all the time now.

Something I noticed from the first video; when the guy goes out into the room while he's tracking, you can hear pretty clearly the drummer is hitting the kicks with a decent amount of force.

I play electronic drums exclusively now, but having tracked real drums before, kick drums always gave me a hassle and I thought it was something on my end but I started noticing that a lot of the metal guys (at least around here) are fucking terrible at tuning their drums to match the type of music they are playing, especially the clowns who don't port the resonant head. The first time I tracked a guy who actually had his shit together, I figured it out.

I guess my question would be (being a guitarist/bassist) that since we don't have to build up much in the way of stamina, what does this mean to the question of being a "better" drummer?

DOES using clicks intensively like Barker make you a "worse" drummer than say Frost, who is maniacal on the kit and completely physically intense? While Barker's not exactly working himself up a sweat...he's on point 100% with his patterns and timing, which is the point, right? To play the patterns in time and reproducing them perfectly live?

Guitarists/bassists/keyboardists don't have to include this kind of physical effort, so it's hard to say. We just play. I tried my hand at the kit once, and it HAS to be crazy to get the endurance of basically running a marathon in place, whilst executing the work on the above kit. Is working smarter (triggers) worse than working harder (no triggers)?

How about vocals? For example, these rap twits who use the vocoder to disguise the fact that they CAN'T sing for shit.

most of everything thing you hear (metal wise) is triggered on record. i understand it as far as recording goes. saves time and time = money, plus no going back to punch in weak hits. however, it does bother me it see it used at a live gig... i think that's total bullshit.

It all depends on what you're trying to achieve and the sound that it produces. There's really no right or wrong answer when there are different ways and different techniques of doing things.