peace sells drum track

16ths.

1) It's a raw drum track played by a human, it's not triggered and then quantized like pretty much darn near every metal album today.

2) Because you're not hearing it with the music, and it's not a trigger, you're hearing the bass drum sound reflect off the walls, which is making the performance seem a bit muddy.

3) Early thrash had a mix of punk rock in it, so drums being a little loose and raw was apart of the vibe they were going for.
 
Not sloppy timing, just the left is louder than the right; either weaker right foot, or bad mix.
That album is sooo good. I'm not crazy about the drumming though, and the drum mix itself is terrible. Like he's in another room.
 
Wow. Amazing how much that track speeds up compared to the tempo laid down at the beginning.

Yeah, pretty sloppy.......although to be completely fair, when you listen to the album track with the other instruments layered on top, it's nowhere near as apparent.

A glaring example that music is indeed the sum of many parts. When an individual part is isolated and held up to scrutiny, it may fall short of expectations.......yet, when we concentrate on "the whole" it slides right by us. I dare say there are probably similar shortcomings in many of our favourite tracks that are able to be carried by the accompanying instruments.

Still, I'm willing to bet you wouldn't hear something that obvious in a Lombardo recording of the time.
 
Pocket, I don't think the tempo is what rotherdrummer was refering to. The double bass toward the end sounds odd because the right and left are uneven volume.

The tempo increase you're refering to is probably intentional and not slop at all.
 
Pocket, I don't think the tempo is what rotherdrummer was refering to. The double bass toward the end sounds odd because the right and left are uneven volume.

The tempo increase you're refering to is probably intentional and not slop at all.

Yeah, I understand that. It was just another issue I noted and made mention of. On the first listen, I played the first few seconds and then went forward to 3.10. The shift in tempo was noticeable. It's remarkably quicker at 3.15 than at 0.30 for example. I'm not convinced it was intentional by design though. I'd be more inclined to think that it was just one of those things that happened in the days prior to recording everything with click tracks and employing the use of pro tools etc to make everything "perfect".

"Sloppy" referred to in the next para, was aimed at the playing, not the tempo. It's not a consistent stream of 16th notes by any measure. But until the isolated drum track was presented to me today, I'd spent the last 29 years none the wiser anyway.
 
yeah, i wasn't talking about the tempo (i actually don't mind fluctation in tempo, i think it can add something to the song if done properly). i'm purely referring to the 16th note double kick towards the end. i appreciate it's not as noticable when it's mixed with all the other instruments, but it still stands out quite a lot to me (that's what prompted me to look on youtube for the drum track). if he was attempting to do straight 16th notes, it sounds sloppy as hell to me. in fact, i reckon if you slowerd it down and counted the kicks, there'd actually be some missing!... i could be wrong, and i can't be bothered to do this! none of us are perfect, but i think i would have asked for a bit more time to get that up to speed... or played something else entirely. when you compare it to lombardo for example from the same sort of era, it's nowhere near as solid
 
These guys were all wacked out of their minds on heroine. Gar pawned his cymbals during the recording of Peace Sells to get money for more smack. Given the fact that they blew their recording buget on drugs and booze (remember this was originally recorded for Combat) and they were all messed up beyond belief I think the album holds up pretty well. It was self produced and I read an interview with Chris Poland where he said that there were very few extra takes. They basically ran through everything as quickly as possible just to get it done.

I like the fact that its not over produced. Give me a little personality in my recordings. Between bad recordings and worse artwork early thrash albums were far from professional endeavors. But the music was great, I think thats why we are still talking about them 20 years later. Give me a little sloppy drumwork over a drum machine any day.
 
don't get me wrong, i like the album and by no means am i a member of the drumming police. i'm quite happy to listen to rock/metal music that's not over-produced... but there's a difference between sounding raw and sounding pretty bad imo. to my ears he sounds like he's struggling to keep the pace for all those bars and is dropping notes. at that point, i would be asking myself "we either need to slow it down a bit or play less notes"

on a side note, if this was our good friend mr ulrich, there'd be hell to pay! he he
 
on a side note, if this was our good friend mr ulrich, there'd be hell to pay! he he

LOL. Yes. If it was Lars, this thread would be eight pages of vitriol already.

Still, as to the "human vs machine" argument, it doesn't have to go to that extreme either. Just listen to Lombardo or Benante. They could carry it off. Power, speed, control, evenness, consistency. Those guys managed to make a better job of it than most metal drummers of the era. No one ever accused them of being "machine-like" though. It can be done.
 
actually, Gar could handle it plenty well. Sometimes he would drop the left kick in a typical pattern where everyone would usually do the 4 on the floor, and it would give it a different sound. He was really a very loose player, but it gave their music a great feel IMO. Much less sterile than their later stuff in the 90's. Go check out the track for My Last Words towards the end. A more difficult, faster pattern, and it's solid the whole way through. He started as a jazz player, and wasn't always interested in playing anything really straight, but he could when he wanted to.
 
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