They just sound like garbage the way they're used these days. It seems like if you're desperate enough to use those to keep eighth notes constantly you might as well sample throwing garbage cans down flights of concrete stairs. It's one thing to have the jazz drummers who can walk on stage with hats and make it sound like they have a full kit, but it confuses me that with all of the innovation that goes on in modern metal drumming we still bash like redheaded stepchildren the fucking things that are designed from the floor up to be used for subtlety and texture. At some point I just got tired of their very existence because there's just no way to get a drummer to stop from falling on the crutch of 'kick, snare, kick snare, bash something hard on the beat, kick...' - it's like going to a bicycle store and not finding anything without training wheels. There are some drummers out there who can use them intelligently (listening to DT right now, for example) but how often do you have people who just see those things and pull DRUMMER SMASH! on them before they even know what tempo they should be bashing in?
Take the first track on Slaughter of the Soul - on the DVD they talk about how badass it is that their drummer pulled this crazy octopus-looking garbage because he had to have the hi-hat and the snare, and the different things they could have tried (moving the hats, switching arms, doing a different pattern altogether), and what are they left with? Constant sloshy noise. Don't get me wrong, I love Blinded By Fear and he's a badass drummer, but I've never understood why so many tracks feature hats getting pounded like that when there are so many *good* sounding cymbals out there. If anything I'd say it's like the coworker in the next cubicle who keeps tapping on things all throughout the day, and although you know he probably isn't aware of it you want to strangle him with CAT5 - I've asked plenty of drummers (right after playing a song or two with them) why there's so much hat smashing while three and four hundred dollar rides and chinas and Kazakhstani neoblungfuckium crash cymbals are completely ignored, and why, after finding ten ways to spin a drumstick, nobody has found another way of keeping the quarter notes, and all I get are blank stares.
To answer the questions, I have on several occasions put my guitar away and packed up because a potential drummer has completely failed to move beyond stock bullshit and try something new. I expect the same courtesy in that way that I offer other people - you don't play the same dead and overused beats that have been beaten like a dead horse for the past fifty years on every goddamned song you play, and I won't build every song I write around a twelve-bar or play the same overused pentatonic licks on every goddamned solo I take. I'm fine with hats being present as long as there's a drummer who can use them, but that's incredibly rare. It makes no sense to spend good money on complicated stands and pedals designed for making something the most versatile tool in a drumset and then leave it in one place so that you can just beat it furiously like you're expecting it to make a sticky mess and go limp if you keep it up long enough.
Oh, and thanks for the loop link - I haven't paid attention to those things in forever.
Jeff
