Finished My Cover Of Stricken and Steven Slate Samples (Clip)

[gibson5413]

I've had several requests for me to finish the Disturbed (Stricken) clip I started a few months ago. I started working on other things and it completely fell to the wayside. I decided to sit down and finish it last night. I decided to throw the lead down as well. I left some mistakes in there because...I make mistakes and I'm too lazy to go back and fix them. No boost was used on the rhythm guitars. I did use a clean boost on the lead to add some hair to it. The Mark IV is so smooth that it needed a tad more edge in this application. Personally I like the Mark IV tone better than the original.

The clip was recorded at very low volume (started about 10:00pm and finished at 11:30pm). In that time I recorded the bass track, rhythm/lead guitars and programmed and resampled the drums. I'm not 100% happy with it but I think it turned out pretty good. I'm slowly getting better at the drum programming. I need to work on randomizing the hit velocities. Some of the mixing levels might be off but my ears stopped working well at about 11:15pm. The Steven Slate samples are/sound fantastic!!! I need to work on humanizing the drums (all in good time).


http://www.netmusicians.org/files/30-Stricken (SS Final).mp3

Either way, hope you like the clip! Let me know what you think.

 

[Djabthrash]

Awesome clip as usual with you.

Guitars are ace as usual (even if i wish you'd still use the ENGL SE EL34 which was awesome sounding, not a huge fan of the Mk IV tone), bass sound is improving, drums also but the latter still need a lot of work IMO.

 

[gibson5413]

Awesome clip as usual with you.

Guitars are ace as usual (even if i wish you'd still use the ENGL SE EL34 which was awesome sounding, not a huge fan of the Mk IV tone), bass sound is improving, drums also but the latter still need a lot of work IMO.

Where do you suggest I begin on the drums? I'm a "nOOb" in terms of drum programming so any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Djabthrash]

Where do you suggest I begin on the drums? I'm a "nOOb" in terms of drum programming so any suggestions would be appreciated.

There is a lot of useful nfo about drums programming on this forum already, but here is my 2 cent :

-Mess up more with velocities, not for the kick (especially for metal) but mainly for the rest (especially cymbals/hi hat/ride, having the same exact hits can totally ruin a song), trying to think like a drummer (maybe watch drumming videos to get this feel) when you're programming.
ex: hi hat: in some drums patterns every second hit should have a lower velocity then the first one.
In general use the velocities to emphasize some hits and not the others.

Then apart from the "groove fitting velocities", randomize the velocities a bit to make it sound more human, even for regular snare hits.

Then about tom/snare rolls, analyse what happens in terms of velocity/right-hand left-hand shit (check drums videos) and try to reproduce it.

To quickly improve the velocity thing, nothing is better than using EZdrummer and its groove library i guess.

-Take some time to choose your samples before considering processing it (Eq-ing, reverb , compression, ...).

In your song did you use Snate samples only for snare/kick drum or did you mix them with other samples (using drumagog for instance) ?

I don't know the song you covered, but i feel your drums sound sounds too much like "hyper clean / clicky modern metal" and should have a bit more of a rock-feel.
And also the drums programming seems a bit too simple for some stuff (tom rolls for instance), i mean there should be some details you didn't care about.

Though i realize this drums track is very decent, and that what i said was a reaction to your past posted samples, where the guitar sound was killer and the drums sounded like guitar pro drums

 

[Djabthrash]

Just listened to the Disturbed song (decent music but oh my god i totally hate the singing):

-the drums definitely sound more "rock-ish"/organic/raw than your drums. Use other samples, and be careful when EQ-ing.

-try to include the small details in your programming : open / closed hi-hat thingie, emphasized hits, and so on... On the hi-hat itself during the verse you can definitely hear that every second hit or so is emphasized or something. That kind of shit makes all the difference between "ok but machine-like sounding drums" and "i thought that was a real drummer type of drums".
For instance i didn't hear anything tricky on some casual tom rolls (the slowest ones) but i noticed a slight crescendo thing on the floor tom (+another tom hit at the same time) stuff, and some other tom rolls are faster and need some velocity work to make them sound realistic.

Those are very small details but they make all the difference really.

 

[gibson5413]

Just listened to the Disturbed song (decent music but oh my god i totally hate the singing):

-the drums definitely sound more "rock-ish"/organic/raw than your drums. Use other samples, and be careful when EQ-ing.

-try to include the small details in your programming : open / closed hi-hat thingie, emphasized hits, and so on... On the hi-hat itself during the verse you can definitely hear that every second hit or so is emphasized or something. That kind of shit makes all the difference between "ok but machine-like sounding drums" and "i thought that was a real drummer type of drums".
For instance i didn't hear anything tricky on some casual tom rolls (the slowest ones) but i noticed a slight crescendo thing on the floor tom (+another tom hit at the same time) stuff, and some other tom rolls are faster and need some velocity work to make them sound realistic.

Those are very small details but they make all the difference really.

I'll work on some of these suggestions. Still trying to get used to Drumagog in general. I actually changed out the kick and EQ'ed it a bit different and I like it better already!