Playing live without a drummer?

[I_Am_The_Fury]

I'm sorry if this is the wrong place for this, but you guys seem to know a lot and hopefully you can give me some input.

My band has consisted of 2 guitarists and one bass player for many months now. We have still not found a drummer, and people are asking us to open up for them. We really want to get something out there, but I don't want to play without any percussion.

What do you guys think of using pre-programmed drums live for such cases? Has anyone done this?

I have Addictive Drums and EZ Drummer which I use to record. Obviously we'd have to practice our asses off, but we've got a few weeks to do that. I know it sounds stupid, but as of right now I think the only way I could do it at the moment is burn a CD with all of the drum tracks.

I appreciate any input.

 

[JeffTD]

You can do it, but your'e going to loose a SHIT ton of energy from having a live drummer. It'll look really boring on stage.

 

[Skinny Viking]

we used to do it sometimes in emergency cases at rehearsal. The singer would just say "let's use Jay-in-a-box"

Shows are something different ... you will lose a LOT of the feel unless your music is specifically tailored to not having a real drummer. There was a great gothic industrial metal band from here called Carfax Abbey that did it and nothing was lost but they also had tons of stage imagery going on ... they would have movie clips from horror movies playing on the wall behind them, smoke, lights, the singer would come out with his entire upper body and head painted black & white in weird patterns ... it was awesome.

For a standard metal band though could be risky. You could try it but if it doesn't work out just remember that'll be people's 1st impression of you guys

 

[I_Am_The_Fury]

Thanks for the replies. I know what you mean. With this band, we don't give a fuck what we look like at all, though. The three of us have been asked to open up for a friend's band 2 hours before the show, and what we did was improvise most of it (which was the best part, we did a kind of post-rock improvisation), play some gypsy punk and really just made ourselves look like asshats. We're totally used to it by now. The other guitarist even dressed ridiculously, we just have that sense of humor and we're not worried about looking like dicks. Losing energy is a bigger thing for us in this case, but it doesn't matter. As long as you can get a somewhat good live mix playing with a drummer that's inside of a CD, I will definitely give it a good shot. Maybe we can somehow test it out on a large scale before..

 

[guitarguru777]

we used to do it sometimes in emergency cases at rehearsal. The singer would just say "let's use Jay-in-a-box"

Shows are something different ... you will lose a LOT of the feel unless your music is specifically tailored to not having a real drummer. There was a great gothic industrial metal band from here called Carfax Abbey that did it and nothing was lost but they also had tons of stage imagery going on ... they would have movie clips from horror movies playing on the wall behind them, smoke, lights, the singer would come out with his entire upper body and head painted black & white in weird patterns ... it was awesome.

For a standard metal band though could be risky. You could try it but if it doesn't work out just remember that'll be people's 1st impression of you guys

Carfax Abbey is the shit!! They did an amazing rendition of Cry Little Sister from the Lost Boys Soundtrack

 

[Mikaël-ange]

Possible imo
Putrid Pile already done it