Chopping up drums in post-production

K.Howden

Senior Member
For long time I've been really into ambient and electronic styles of music. I've been listening to a lot of Chris Clark recently and came across this track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdOb3jA8tgE called "Herr Bar"

Chris plays a lot of his drum tracks and then chops them up and uses all sorts of techniques to "glitch them up" as my friend likes to say, his reason for doing so according to people I've talked is to create a sense of ambiguity and distance and speaking as a listener for the first time it really made me wonder whether it was human or programmed.

This track got me wondering as I've not really seen much discussion of this side of drums and percussion on the DW Forum, so! Just a few questions:

- What are your opinions on this method? It's uses, implications and place within in drumming and it's importance.

- What is your experience with this doing this yourself and how did you go about it? and have you ever emulated this kind of 'angular' style live and what did it do for you as a player?

- And finally can anyone recommend or point me in the direction of more artists who do this sort of thing?

Personally I find this really interesting! And would make for an interesting challenge if you were to try and get a similar feel live.

Hope everyone's well,

Kev
 
Sounds pretty cool to me. It certainly created a lot of tension.

My view of the studio is you do whatever it takes to create the most satisfying music possible since recorded music will never have the presence of live performance. I've knitted recordings together and overlaid them, but not my own drumming. Not a bad idea ...
 
I think you've hit the nail right on the head there Polly. I see recorded music as different entity entirley to live (unless of course you're recording a live performance).

If you look back over the past century or so you can see that society and musicians have made a steady progress towards separating the sound aspect of music from the visual aspect of people performing the music.

We can see the start of this with Wagner and the invention of orchestra-pit, the idea being that the sound would envelop the performance of the actors on-stage with the lighting and backdrops to create an 'experience' that was almost dream like. With the advent of recording, music could now envelop our homes and daily home-life using the gramophone, stereogram and as time went on the tape-player and CD player and of course the radio. The portable tape player and eventually CD walkman, MP3 and i-pod etc have got us to the point where we can surround our everyday experience and the greater world around us anywhere we happen to be with music, effectively providing a personal sound-track to our lives and experiences.

It's fascinating to see that music has effectively spilt into two: music to surround our everyday lives and live music for the experience of seeing and hearing music being made.

Hope you're keeping well,

Kev
 
Interesting thoughts, Kev.

Yes, and there are hybrids of the two poles you talked about. For instance, video bridges that gap, but also stylises both the audio and visual aspects. I also draw a distinction between music for listening and music for hearing (the latter funnily termed by Matt Smith as "artificial musiclike product") - the difference between a hung artwork and wallpaper.

I like organic sounds in electronica; Deep Forest's debut knocked me out. To me, what they did with African people's voices is not miles from what CC did with his drumming in Herr Bar. He still gets the physical fun of real playing plus the enjoyment of creating a pleasing collage from the recording. Cool :)
 
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