Metal drum mixes without triggers or sound replacement

drummingman

drummingman

Gold Member
I'm looking for metal albums that don't have triggers or sound replacement. Stuff that was recorded over the last 20 or so years would be nice. But if they go further back that's ok.

The reason why I'm looking is because I want to compile a set of albums that I like the drum sounds so that when I'm giving examples to those who are doing mixes for my bands I can point them in the direction of what I'm going for sound wise for the drums.

Thanks
 
There is really no way of knowing which albums have used drum samples and which havnt. Well, except St Anger, I think we can all agree no samples were used there. Im not sure if you can even trust the drummers who made the albums since all kinds of crazy stuff happens in the mix.

My advice is to simply find albums with drum mixes you do like and ask the mixer to get close to that. If he has to use samples so what, the goal is a great sounding record, not some antiquated idea of musical purity. My last recording the mixing engineer stepped all over the snare, and it sounds great. We also reamped some of the guitar parts, nobody saw that as a problem, just part of the recording process.
 
Cynic "Focus" (1993)
Death "Human" (1991)
I remember the drummer, Sean Reinert, answering the question if the drums were triggered, with: "No, that's all Scotty Burns".
If you don't know who Scott Burns is...
 
I'd get in touch with Glenn Fricker. I don't think he uses any triggering, and his studio focuses on metal.

https://spectremedia.ca/

The dude's got a mouth on him, but I'm pretty sure he produces pretty good work. Seems to know his stuff too!
 
spelman said:
Cynic "Focus" (1993)
Death "Human" (1991)
I remember the drummer, Sean Reinert, answering the question if the drums were triggered, with: "No, that's all Scotty Burns".
If you don't know who Scott Burns is...
Click to expand...

Both amazing albums too. Definitely worth a listen for the OP.
 
Just remembered - ALL Meshuggah albums are trigger-free. Tomas only uses triggers live to compensate for really fast patterns like in Bleed and to keep the kick sound consistent (he's also sustained injuries in his legs/feet). I remember hearing him at sound check.
 
JosephDAqui said:
Just remembered - ALL Meshuggah albums are trigger-free.
Click to expand...

Well, except Catch 33, which doesn't have Haake on the record at all - they're his samples, programmed by Frederik Thordendal. And some early stuff like War, which is the same. And ObZen, which has Haake samples blended with the acoustic drum sound. Violent Sleep is 100% live-recorded drums though, and they sound insanely good.

Gojira have good real drum sounds - From Mars to Sirius was self-produced, and by all accounts I've found, it took them something like a year to mix because their live sound guy mixed it, and didn't use samples. And if you hit like Mario Duplantier does, you shouldn't need too much help getting a drum sound that'll take your head off. The Way of All Flesh sounds like all real drums to my ears too.

Then there's all the Nolly-produced stuff, be it Periphery or otherwise. I'm not a huge fan of that sound, but Periphery records don't have samples on them.

A lot of Devin Townsend's records sound like real drums to me, but it's hard to say for sure. I love the drum sounds on Deconstruction and Transcendence.
 
I'm not even sure how one can tell anymore.

Most drums that aren't triggered are compressed and EQ-ed to sound like a trigger. And as sampling technology has gotten better and better over the years, one can have very natural sounding drums with sound replacement/triggering.

And once a drum sound is recording into a DAW like Protools, it's essentially no different than a sample.

Both are digital recordings of someone hitting a drum.
 
DrumEatDrum said:
And once a drum sound is recording into a DAW like Protools, it's essentially no different than a sample.

Both are digital recordings of someone hitting a drum.
Click to expand...

That's a little bit like saying a puddle and a lake are the same thing, though, don't you think? They're both collections of water in a basin, after all.

Samples are recordings, but recordings aren't necessarily samples. A recording of a performance, regardless of recording medium, are still recordings of a performance, unlike a sample, which is just one sound at any given time. And besides, there were lots of samplers before the invention of Pro Tools, and lots of records that were made with samples before the use of DAWs became widespread.

Drum recordings in Pro Tools are no different than recordings onto tape until you start editing them, and even so, it's not really any different than chopping and splicing lengths of tape, though it is a whole lot easier on the computer.
 
Mercyful Fate- Into The Unknown
 
You can't tell anymore.

with the 1000's of gigs of samples, intelligent triggering software I have played around with both and I have found samples that sound more natural than many "real" recorded albums.

Most metal producers even mix with so much compression, eq, plugins, heavy gates, that you get a super produced sound. They are essentially going for the same sound as the samples.

Things like BFD3, addictive drums, superior, slate etc have super produced samples, and natural samples with overheads, room mics, and all kinds of great things.. There is bleed control in on the mics and much more stuff to make it sound as real as you want based on your skill.

You can also sample your own kit and make your own sample packs with 100's of levels of velocity if you want. so your dynamics are basically 100% accurate.

Unfortunately the metal world now turns the bassdrum dynamics off.. crank the snare and toms to near full velocity which takes a bit of the life out of it.

editing and splicing tape has been done for decades, same with samples. Heck, auto tune has been applied to 1000's of albums for decades. I was shocked at a few I found out that needed the studio magic because they sounded pretty raw still and like it hadn't been applied.
 
drummingman said:
I'm looking for metal albums that don't have triggers or sound replacement. Stuff that was recorded over the last 20 or so years would be nice. But if they go further back that's ok.

The reason why I'm looking is because I want to compile a set of albums that I like the drum sounds so that when I'm giving examples to those who are doing mixes for my bands I can point them in the direction of what I'm going for sound wise for the drums.

Thanks
Click to expand...

You'll have to go back about 25 years to even find recordings without samples on the drums. And not just metal but country all the way to Jazz have sound replaced drums on them now.

The art of the "sound and touch" has pretty much been lost forever in modern recordings.

D
 
Derek Roddy said:
You'll have to go back about 25 years to even find recordings without samples on the drums. And not just metal but country all the way to Jazz have sound replaced drums on them now.

The art of the "sound and touch" has pretty much been lost forever in modern recordings.

D
Click to expand...

Being that so much is sound replaced does one always have to watch their recordings like a hawk to make sure that nothing gets left out in the final product? Meaning everything from ghost notes to even just the basic rhythms that are played? I ask for 2 reasons, first I know that not everything gets picked up perfectly on the transient files for the samples to be placed over. And second because if things in ones performance can be so easily altered by samples what's to stop someone from changing what the drummer actually played just because they may feel like doing so?
 
drummingman said:
Being that so much is sound replaced does one always have to watch their recordings like a hawk to make sure that nothing gets left out in the final product? Meaning everything from ghost notes to even just the basic rhythms that are played? I ask for 2 reasons, first I know that not everything gets picked up perfectly on the transient files for the samples to be placed over. And second because if things in ones performance can be so easily altered by samples what's to stop someone from changing what the drummer actually played just because they may feel like doing so?
Click to expand...

The modern day sound replacing software is really good (which is why so many drummers in this thread are giving examples of sampled drums as being real)
So thats not much of a concern.
Your second reason is something I've been vocal about for a very long time. Capturing and enhancing a performance is completely different than altering said performance.
Unfortunately its the norm now a days. You have no idea of the professional drummers who bitch to me about their drumming being put on a grid and made to sound "perfect" (which we ALL know, esp the professional drummers who put time and effort into making sure they play as consistent as possible) that NOBODY plays perfect.

All these records with perfect drums aren't real drums.

And whop d doo that they can "play it live"....then why couldn't they live with their own performance on a recording?

Almost 100% of metal you hear these days aren't real performances. And that goes for all the other instruments as well.

D
 
Derek Roddy said:
The modern day sound replacing software is really good (which is why so many drummers in this thread are giving examples of sampled drums as being real)
So thats not much of a concern.
Your second reason is something I've been vocal about for a very long time. Capturing and enhancing a performance is completely different than altering said performance.
Unfortunately its the norm now a days. You have no idea of the professional drummers who bitch to me about their drumming being put on a grid and made to sound "perfect" (which we ALL know, esp the professional drummers who put time and effort into making sure they play as consistent as possible) that NOBODY plays perfect.

All these records with perfect drums aren't real drums.

And whop d doo that they can "play it live"....then why couldn't they live with their own performance on a recording?

Almost 100% of metal you hear these days aren't real performances. And that goes for all the other instruments as well.

D
Click to expand...

Man, that second point is a sad state of thing's. As musicians we practice and put in so much time to have our own feel and sound just to have to battle with other people to not be put on a grid and have all our signature sound edited out by a machine. And honestly what I think makes it even worse is that when other musicians hear real drum's and real drumming on an album it sounds "wrong" to them because they are used to hearing a false representation of what real drum's played by a real drummer sounds like. It would be nice to see this type of trend in the industry turn around.

On the first point, I just had to have my tom's on a ep that I just did sound replaced because one of the mics was messed up and we did not catch it until after all the tracks were recorded. So I had to sit with my friend and make sure that he got all the hits and dynamics lined up perfectly to what I played. It took a good while because the program he was using could not get everything right. So he had to manually plug in a lot of hits with the right dynamics to make sure it was what I played. But I had to be there with him to make sure he got it all right. Maybe it was the program that he was using but it made me wonder how messed up my playing would have sounded had I not been able to be there watching the process like a hawk because the program got so much wrong. So that whole process makes me very nervous about ever having to trust someone else to do a good job with sound replacing if I'm not right there with them. And I imagine that is the case a lot of the times for lots of touring drummers because they record their album then they go back out on the road while it's being mixed and mastered and the drums are being sound replaced.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top