Advice sought on live sampled drums (a la Samel)

[NotAlone]

Greetings, everyone!

First post, thought I have been using the forum as a kind of wiki for all metal production issues for over a year now, so thanks and congrats.

To the point, my band is going to finally opt to go on without a drummer, as we've have more than enough disappointing experiences in the past years and well.. we also seem to have depleted our local resource of musicians :Smug:

So, the idea is to trigger the drums and some other stuff and play guitars and vocals on top. Does anyone here have any experience on something similar? Any tip on the track processing?

Thanks, guys.

 

[John_C]

Greetings, everyone!

First post, thought I have been using the forum as a kind of wiki for all metal production issues for over a year now, so thanks and congrats.

To the point, my band is going to finally opt to go on without a drummer, as we've have more than enough disappointing experiences in the past years and well.. we also seem to have depleted our local resource of musicians :Smug:

So, the idea is to trigger the drums and some other stuff and play guitars and vocals on top. Does anyone here have any experience on something similar? Any tip on the track processing?

Thanks, guys.

what you need to do is write out the drum parts in MIDI, then feed that into an external drum module or an equivalent "in the box" setup

all the track processing information is covered multiple times elsewhere on the forum

 

[NotAlone]

Thanks, skeskis.

I got the hardware part covered: laptop + audio interface + drum VSTi and all that.

I was thinking if drum processing should be any different for live use, and well... it seems the answer is no

 

[Morgan C]

Can't you just bounce the drums out and play it as an audio file? Give it to the sound engineer who can play it off a CD or something?

 

[abigor731]

i've had some very disappointing expiriences with drummers too, and i came to the conclusion that drumsamples are the only foolproof solution

i am planning to do this with my grindcore band,
as the blasts sound quite monotonous its not always easy to play along, therefore we have one stereo drum track, and an additional track with a metronome that are routed only to the monitors,
if your interface has more than two output channels you could consider that too, it makes playing to the drum tracks a lot easier

though i'm afraid i don't really know wether to process drums differently on live gigs

it is even possible to have the exact tone of your studio recordings, you just have to route everything through an interface, and use the same plugins, make an impulse from the guitar and bass cabinets, and get the guitar/bass signals from the fx loop,
well, maybe it doesn't sound completely identical with impulses, but i'd say this is at least a good starting point
i do this, because our setup is quite simple (just mic + multi-effect-units which go directly into the pa anyway)
i haven't tried this out on a live gig yet (sadly, we didn't have any gigs yet )

of course you could also leave the individual drum components unprocessed, and route every drum component to another output of the interface, so that the people from the location where you're playing can mix the drums

 

[NotAlone]

Morgoe, I already tried the CD approach and it didn't work out too well. I'd rather pick a solution that doesn't depend on anyone else (guess that is the general policy of the band right now )

Abigor, I'll probably have to buy a new interface, so I'll definitely look for something with more that two outputs! The multiple unprocessed outs is a good idea, but... will there be enough channels when sharing stage with other bands (with real drums)? Still, a like it, so I may leave the option of both rendering every track and having a drum bus too for a mixed stereo.

Thanks both of you for your answers and well... every experience or ideas help, so keep them coming!

 

[Erik Monsonis]

Hey

I know exactly what you mean with "depleted the local scene musicians"... Fortunately I got a badass drummer who likes playing to a click and all that stuff drummers hate!

good luck with that man, I'd program the drums as if I was going to make a preproduction demo and trigger that in Reaper with metronome sent to another output (to the monitors only)

Cheers!
-Erik

 

[crosstalk]

I would get the tracks the way you want, bounce them down and then play them from your laptop instead of a CD. This way there isn't any worry of something going screwy in one of the numerous plugins running or some random error.

 

[NotAlone]

Erik: You, sir, are a lucky man

Crosstalk: Indeed, the simpler the better!