Re: The Reverend
All of you that have talked about his tightness, chops, fitting with the band, obviously haven't done an A-B comparison between the City Of Evil / Waking The Fallen albums, and the Sounding The Seventh Trumpet album.
COE, and WTF are uber engineered, edited and processed which is why his kit sounds as it does and how he plays so tightly with the band, cos a protools engineer has cut the drum tracks up and moved them into place with the rest of the band. As far as I can tell, A7X's budget was slightly smaller on the STST album so we hear them as they are. Loose. Like their playing material too tricky for them. Just listen to the bass drum when it should be in sync with the guitar chugs, or his immense tom fills that dont quite end on the beat.
Dont get me wrong, I have seen them live, and they get most of it right, but as it's been said on previous pages in this thread, most of it is triggered as u can see by the mahoosive rack of samplers, midi processors, etc that sits on his left in the photos.
This is years late, but this has been bugging me.
Making a comparison of something recorded over 6 years ago (from your post date) means little for a few reasons. It was their first album; they had little production values. It was a pretty raw recording done when the band was all around 20. It was recorded on a very small budget. A lot of the album was recorded in a single take and not recorded to a click. They had no real producer to tell them what to do or make them do more takes. Also the fact that it was recorded fairly long ago also means that there's been much time to improve, as most people do, so that doesn't mean much at all in comparison to today.
For Waking the Fallen, they had a producer come in and teach them how to really record an album with good production values. (You can see this on their DVD.) They learned how to play to a click, they were (not literally) beat up by their producer and they took their time recording the album. That album was done on an independent label, so it wasn't really high budget. I doubt it would be all pro tools. One of my favorite live performances of theirs from around this time would be this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5LqNMBqePo Overall good drumming.
For City of Evil, I'm pretty sure that was a lot of engineering done on that to get a special sound. I'm fairly certain there are some sampled sounds (hello Beast and the Harlot kick drum). There's one clip of him on youtube recording parts of a couple songs for CoE, which you can watch here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSXPKAwKj4I Definitely not sloppy studio magic. Not much else to say here for certain.
However, if their sound is triggered live (which it doesn't sound like), that has nothing to do with his tightness (or looseness); a sloppy drummer with triggers is still sloppy. Just from clips of watching him perform live, I don't think it would be triggers, since his kit in general sounds great (DW, woohoo):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjQ5PdFr3bM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHKXbfTgiAI&feature=related#t=07m40s Although you never know, I don't think it's much of an issue. On an interesting note, I recall in an interview (with Modern Drummer I think), he said all the drumming on their self-titled album was not sampled sounds. Oh, and leaving this here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6aBD56exLY
Anyway, it really sucks that he died (especially since I'm a fan, I guess), both for his drumming and because he's just a really cool guy. A7X finished writing their next album and was supposed to start recording this month, had he not died.
I was just listening to only the drum track for several songs and just thought I would share.
Beast and the Harlot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xuzBeGmKaA
Almost Easy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x2z2o5ne78
Critical Acclaim:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzuXDWBB7vo