Not to derail the thread, but whatever happened to Eighteen Visions? I saw them open for Strung Out twice in 2002-2003 and then...*poof*...never heard about them again. They had an awesome stage show.
They broke up. :c
Playing the same 12 songs night after night will make you tighter on those 12 songs and will up your overall game to some extent. But playing the same 12 songs live every night is not going to turn a bad or average musician into a virtuoso.
Oh man, this post is so misguided it's not even funny. For one thing, aside from bands like Dream Theater and Symphony X that have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can play beyond normal expectations, you couldn't prove who actually is a "virtuoso" in metal. In fact, most of these bands with noodly players are fucking horrible live. Just because you can sweep pick doesn't make you a tight guitarist. Just because you're playing "simple" music doesn't make you a bad musician. Playing night after night, regardless of whether or not it's the same 12 songs, turns you into a playing machine. It's the simple fact of life. .
It proves they have a larger studio budget than most; they can afford a skilled engineer and the studio time to get live drums right.
No it's because they can actually play their instruments. Most bands cannot. The end.
How do live drums prove anything about musicianship other than the drummer's ability to keep time? The rest of the band is playing to a drum track. How is something additional required of the other musicians, if they're listening to a track that was recorded by a live drummer as opposed to a track recorded by machine? Both are recorded, both are in the correct time.
For one thing, I'm not talking about machines. So often - drummers will record their drums the old fashioned way, but because they aren't good for whatever reason (maybe because they don't tour enough, etc), the engineer will almost always chop up the kit in pro tools, edit it, re-sample all the hits and mix down the kit that way. And keeping that in mind, most engineers do the exact same thing with guitars, bass, vocals, etc with I would easily argue to be around 75% of bands. In FACT, a surprising chunk of bands these days metal or otherwise don't even play their own instruments on the record because they are so shitty, and they just have the engineer do it for them.
A7X is one of the few bands that actually uses real drums, real instruments, etc. You can tell just by listening to the record that there was very little (if not any at all) editing or pro-tooling going on. That's because those guys are tight as fuck. Budget doesn't really make a difference - yeah A7X has more money to fuck around and get things perfect - but I've seen bands get similar sounding productions with real instruments and no editing for under 10 grand. It's all about your own ability to play, not so much how the record costs. Five Finger Death Punch is an example of a band that could have gotten a ton of money to make music and they pas on it for cheap digital recordings, fake drums, autotuned vocals, etc. Obviously their label loves this because they make more money on the back end, and so does the band, inevitably - because their fans don't really care how horrible their records sound from a production standpoint. That being said those guys can still play extremely tight at the end of the day, because they have to.
