Programming metal drums

[mattvdh]

I'm trying to write some drum parts for a song I'm working on and I can't seem to get the right tempo's for my beats. AS you all know, in metal there's a few types of 'fast' beats.

1. fast thrash/skank beat. used by slayer and a million hardcore and metal bands like at the gates.

2. Slightly faster Blackmetal blast. This is the same beat just slightly sped up. used by bands like sacramentum, necophobic and a lot of black metal bands.

3. full out blast--same beat, just sped up even more so.

The problem is that when I try to write a song on drums I can only get two beats to work/flow properly (1, and 3, because this is 8th to 16th), but unable to accomplish the 2nd type because there's not really an appropriate timing setting available..

in this file I have included the 3 types I am referring to made in fruity loops:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=U0U64CN5

I've tried importing the different waves in to acid pro so that I could work around this issue, but its extremely tedious to go back and fourth and it didn't sound very natural.

I have this same problem when I play drums to a metronome actually, the 8th notes on a 250bpm click sound right (or 125 depending on how you look at it), and so do the 16ths, but I can't seem to figure out how to get in that slightly faster skank/black metal beat on a metronome.

Any suggestions?

 

[sumairetsu]

From what I hear with Black or Death Metal songs with blast beats, often the tempo of the song is not that fast. In my mind, the hits on the snare can usually be divided up as 8th note triplets (3 hits for every quarter note). For instance, listen to Morbid Angel's "Rapture" from their "Covenant" album. Each of those snare hits register in my mind as 8th note triplets to a beat of around 160 beats or so per minute. This is what I use with ACID Pro and the results seem to work well enough.

As for Thrash beats, I find using the snare on the beat itself works best. So, for every quarter note, there's a snare hit (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4) and then I put the kick drum hit on the 8th following the beat. So, it would look like this:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + (Place the kick where the "+" sign is and the snare on the beat number.)

For more of a groove, I'll switch the kick with the snare so the the kick is on the beat and the snare on the 8th.

ACID presents a unique problem in that the tempo will only go as high as 200 beats per minute, but I find that if I reduce the tempo and switch to 8/8 time I can work around this.

Hope this works for you.

 

[MercilessFire]

With fruity loops, to get the triplet feel i found out you have to slice the note in 3 equal places or so. I make all my drum tracks in FL Studio (fruity loops) and have mucked around with it for the last maybe 4 years of my life.

Are you using a VSTi program within fruity loops to make the drums? or are you using the standard inbuilt drums that come with the program?

I personally use Toontracks Superior Drummer 2 with the Drumkit From Hell (from EZdrummer which is toontrack as well) expansion which you may or may no know is actually the drummer from Meshuggah's drumming.

If you are using your own audio drum files like a separate file for a separate drum (snare, bass, cymbals, etc...) then when you are best off using the piano roll option to input the correct beat so as that you can actually 'Slice' the note wherever you need to. Like if you want a triplet feel in an 8th note, create a bar about 2 squares long then press 'C' or find the slice tool and then you need to choose a spot and drag the line down to where you want to cut. Take note that you may not get it first time everytime as it takes a bit to get used to.
What i will do is if i get a perfect triplet there, i will actually copy and past the three notes and place them 1 after the other to keep them going.

If you havent got toontracks drum programs i would actually suggest you look into it. theyre simple to use and sound great... if used them for about a year now and never looked back.

Here is an example of my own song (stupid title but was drunk when did it LOL... more of a working title)


I dont use triplets much in here except in little blasts before snare hits. My other song on youtube called merciless actually has triplet double kicking in it...


Hope i have helped...

MF

 

[mattvdh]

From what I hear with Black or Death Metal songs with blast beats, often the tempo of the song is not that fast. In my mind, the hits on the snare can usually be divided up as 8th note triplets (3 hits for every quarter note). For instance, listen to Morbid Angel's "Rapture" from their "Covenant" album. Each of those snare hits register in my mind as 8th note triplets to a beat of around 160 beats or so per minute. This is what I use with ACID Pro and the results seem to work well enough.

As for Thrash beats, I find using the snare on the beat itself works best. So, for every quarter note, there's a snare hit (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4) and then I put the kick drum hit on the 8th following the beat. So, it would look like this:

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + (Place the kick where the "+" sign is and the snare on the beat number.)

For more of a groove, I'll switch the kick with the snare so the the kick is on the beat and the snare on the 8th.

ACID presents a unique problem in that the tempo will only go as high as 200 beats per minute, but I find that if I reduce the tempo and switch to 8/8 time I can work around this.

Hope this works for you.

Thanks for the reply. OK, the beats could've also been timed at:
170, 190, and 250bpms btw. I just wrote out the kick and snare hits to be fairly spaced out so that's why the original tracks are at such high BPMs.

I'm not sure if there's a way around this besides sloppily copying and pasting the black metal beat it in cool edit.

Another problem I'm having with timing is that I want to program a tempo map in cubase that starts on 4/4 at 250bpms and switches to 3/4, 250. Any ideas on either questions? cheers

 

[elad]

You might wanna try the Metal drum tracks at: www.DrumTracks.com

The tracks are full-length 3-5 minutes long - DRUMS ONLY.