Modern metal band tricks........

[Jordon]

Well, on a lot of modern hard rock and metal records, the guitar is tracked 1 or 2 bars at a time. Guitars are tuned to the fretted chord, played, then tuned to the next fretted chord. It can get insane. A lot of times, a DI signal is taken with the amp tracks so the guitars can be edited to the kick and snare, or to the grid. Most of it comes down to taste, though. I do a bit of all of that in my productions, but I don't go to the point of it sounding un-natural.

For example: Great drummer, phenomenal singer, good guitarists =

The drums were edited, and the kick was sample-replaced, the snare was stacked with a sample for reinforcement. The bass was time-aligned with the kick drum and pitch-corrected via Melodyne. Due to the nature of the song, the guitars in the main riff and bridge were time-aligned like the bass. Maybe 10% of the lead vocal was pitch corrected, about 80% of the backing vocals were hard-corrected. All auxilliary vocals were time-aligned to the lead. Sorry, it's just a rough mix I started before I went on vaca this winter.

I'm glad all my studio/engineering days were well before digital was the norm. It makes you wonder how could any decent rock/metal recordings have been accomplished before all this digital necessity for editing

That's the reason record took a year and a half and a million dollars to make. You didn't have 6 months to track vocals to make sure every single note is perfect. There also wasn't the industry demand there is now for "unique-but-the-same" sounding albums.

Besides, don't diminish that bad I just posted. They're fantastic live, as are most of the bands I work with. I have studio-live prepro sessions that could be mixed and pressed and sound incredible.

Either way, it's just the way the industry is now, at least for hard rock and metal. Pop has been that way for a couple decades now. I see mainstream country going more and more in that overproduced direction, but fuckit...It's country In the end, as an engineer, you have exactly 2 groups of people to please: the label, and the band. In that order. That's it.

 

[crwnedblasphemy]

I've talked to the guys numerous times in Born of Osiris. Nice guys always willing to talk gear. Super respectful at my place of work.

 

[skoora]

Well, on a lot of modern hard rock and metal records, the guitar is tracked 1 or 2 bars at a time. Guitars are tuned to the fretted chord, played, then tuned to the next fretted chord. It can get insane. A lot of times, a DI signal is taken with the amp tracks so the guitars can be edited to the kick and snare, or to the grid. Most of it comes down to taste, though. I do a bit of all of that in my productions, but I don't go to the point of it sounding un-natural.

For example: Great drummer, phenomenal singer, good guitarists =

The drums were edited, and the kick was sample-replaced, the snare was stacked with a sample for reinforcement. The bass was time-aligned with the kick drum and pitch-corrected via Melodyne. Due to the nature of the song, the guitars in the main riff and bridge were time-aligned like the bass. Maybe 10% of the lead vocal was pitch corrected, about 80% of the backing vocals were hard-corrected. All auxilliary vocals were time-aligned to the lead. Sorry, it's just a rough mix I started before I went on vaca this winter.

I'm glad all my studio/engineering days were well before digital was the norm. It makes you wonder how could any decent rock/metal recordings have been accomplished before all this digital necessity for editing

That's the reason record took a year and a half and a million dollars to make. You didn't have 6 months to track vocals to make sure every single note is perfect. There also wasn't the industry demand there is now for "unique-but-the-same" sounding albums.

Besides, don't diminish that bad I just posted. They're fantastic live, as are most of the bands I work with. I have studio-live prepro sessions that could be mixed and pressed and sound incredible.

Either way, it's just the way the industry is now, at least for hard rock and metal. Pop has been that way for a couple decades now. I see mainstream country going more and more in that overproduced direction, but fuckit...It's country In the end, as an engineer, you have exactly 2 groups of people to please: the label, and the band. In that order. That's it.

Shit man, Country and Auto-tune are one in the same. It was Country music that first brought auto-tune to my attention
I guess I'm in the school that says if you can't play what your attempting to write without all the editing then you either need to practice more or write something simpler. I get the occasional flub getting fixed. You don't want to toss a great pass at a verse or instrument solo/fill, or even a simple miss hit snare but really extensive bar by bar stuff like you mentioned i find ridiculous that's it considered the norm now. Not knocking what you do at all, just that it's become a standard that you have to live up to for the labels and the artists.

It was only megastar records that were in the scenario you described as far as budget and time. Most medium level artists that produced amazing records were done in much less time for a lot less money.....but I digress. I guarantee if I turn on the main, modern rock station here in Seattle right now I'll hear that damn Chevelle song again

 

[NS10Fan]

I've only personally seen one band where the drummer was "flutter foot" double kickin' and it sounded like absolute ass. I forget names, but it was one of the many genero-metal acts an old band had to share a bill with a few years ago. It was obvious that in the studio, I'm sure it sounded amazing to them, and they never realized that without triggers in their situation, the kick sounded like puss. He was bragging about the BPMs he could double-stroke to as well.

Long and short, there are tons of "tricks" for every type of music, not just metal. It all comes out in the wash though, whether or not anyone can pull it off.

 

[mrTapp]

I have seen Meshuggah a couple of times....

Tomas Hake the drummer...no need for drum machine
quote]


All the drums on that record were programmed with Drumkit From Hell. Just sayin'


Oh, and the record that QOTSA did with Joe Baressi...Well, they tracked the drum shells separate from the overheads. Is that cheating?

And, Nirvana's Nevermind and Metallica's Black Album had sample replacement and sample stacking on the drums.

Don't mean to be a post whore, but I'm losing my mind with all the bad information being tossed around as fact in this thread.

Haha... i thought it was the previous one....

Well...except this they always recorded the drums without triggers...can not really say for the kick...but all the rest where micked.

 

[Jordon]

I have seen Meshuggah a couple of times....

Tomas Hake the drummer...no need for drum machine
quote]


All the drums on that record were programmed with Drumkit From Hell. Just sayin'


Oh, and the record that QOTSA did with Joe Baressi...Well, they tracked the drum shells separate from the overheads. Is that cheating?

And, Nirvana's Nevermind and Metallica's Black Album had sample replacement and sample stacking on the drums.

Don't mean to be a post whore, but I'm losing my mind with all the bad information being tossed around as fact in this thread.

Haha... i thought it was the previous one....

Well...except this they always recorded the drums without triggers...can not really say for the kick...but all the rest where micked.

Shit, you're right. obZen was played AND programmed, Catch was the one that was fully progged. Foot-in-mouth. And irony. Awesome.

 

[Jordon]

I've talked to the guys numerous times in Born of Osiris. Nice guys always willing to talk gear. Super respectful at my place of work.

Seriously good guys! A buddy of mine went on the road with them as a crew member.

 

[Jordon]

Well, on a lot of modern hard rock and metal records, the guitar is tracked 1 or 2 bars at a time. Guitars are tuned to the fretted chord, played, then tuned to the next fretted chord. It can get insane. A lot of times, a DI signal is taken with the amp tracks so the guitars can be edited to the kick and snare, or to the grid. Most of it comes down to taste, though. I do a bit of all of that in my productions, but I don't go to the point of it sounding un-natural.

For example: Great drummer, phenomenal singer, good guitarists =

The drums were edited, and the kick was sample-replaced, the snare was stacked with a sample for reinforcement. The bass was time-aligned with the kick drum and pitch-corrected via Melodyne. Due to the nature of the song, the guitars in the main riff and bridge were time-aligned like the bass. Maybe 10% of the lead vocal was pitch corrected, about 80% of the backing vocals were hard-corrected. All auxilliary vocals were time-aligned to the lead. Sorry, it's just a rough mix I started before I went on vaca this winter.

I'm glad all my studio/engineering days were well before digital was the norm. It makes you wonder how could any decent rock/metal recordings have been accomplished before all this digital necessity for editing

That's the reason record took a year and a half and a million dollars to make. You didn't have 6 months to track vocals to make sure every single note is perfect. There also wasn't the industry demand there is now for "unique-but-the-same" sounding albums.

Besides, don't diminish that bad I just posted. They're fantastic live, as are most of the bands I work with. I have studio-live prepro sessions that could be mixed and pressed and sound incredible.

Either way, it's just the way the industry is now, at least for hard rock and metal. Pop has been that way for a couple decades now. I see mainstream country going more and more in that overproduced direction, but fuckit...It's country In the end, as an engineer, you have exactly 2 groups of people to please: the label, and the band. In that order. That's it.

Shit man, Country and Auto-tune are one in the same. It was Country music that first brought auto-tune to my attention
I guess I'm in the school that says if you can't play what your attempting to write without all the editing then you either need to practice more or write something simpler. I get the occasional flub getting fixed. You don't want to toss a great pass at a verse or instrument solo/fill, or even a simple miss hit snare but really extensive bar by bar stuff like you mentioned i find ridiculous that's it considered the norm now. Not knocking what you do at all, just that it's become a standard that you have to live up to for the labels and the artists.

It was only megastar records that were in the scenario you described as far as budget and time. Most medium level artists that produced amazing records were done in much less time for a lot less money.....but I digress. I guarantee if I turn on the main, modern rock station here in Seattle right now I'll hear that damn Chevelle song again

I agree with many of the points you're making. One big point I tried to get across is in my production work, it's not line-by-line, bar-by-bar every time. Most projects I do have zero guitar editing, and minimal editing on everything else but drums. I try to use it for effect, or to convey the part more effectively.

I actually send musicians home a lot. I had a vocalist in a few months ago, he was in for 4 hours, cut one lead vocal on a song...barely, and I sent his ass packing. Told him he had a week to work out melodies and lyrics. He would say "hey, the 2nd chorus is the same, copy it over." To which my reply would be "Sing the fucking part. And give me a double. And a triple. And get it right."

Unlike most modern "producers" or engineers, I don't have very much patience for musicians who cannot play their songs. I'm not willing to spend 3 times the amount of time editing something to sound decent than it took to track it in the first place. Thats why I stressed that you cannot take a shitty performance and edit it to be good. You can take a good or great performance and tweak it to near-perfection, but that's all. I've sent bassists out to lunch and retracked their entire record in an hour or two. I hate doing that, and thankfully it's rare, but it's gotta get done. At any given moment, I'm working on 2-3 different records, and I'm thankful that I don't work with bands that just fuck off the whole time.

It's unfortunate that things are headed that way, but it's the side-effect of the "basement producer" with his MacBook, MBox and cracked Waves plugins. Shit, you know there are programs that will spit out MIDI-generated bass and guitar DI's? And they're super convincing (one of the Black Dahlia Murder records had totally programmed bass done with Trillian, and it sounded great). MIDI that shit, print the DI and reamp it. Fuck.

 

[maddnotez]

Amen to Jordan, Might send you some drums to edit


You guys are getting rediculous in here.

I think triggers are used only for the sound not to magically make you Derek Roddy. (even he probably uses triggers).

Most good bands edit tracks plain and simple.

 

[glassjaw7]

the thing with triggers is they correct the sloppy playing man...... a sloppy double bass is "somewhat" corrected (the drummer needs to be in time though) but still......I 'm not saying it's UBER cheating.......but in the 80s there weren't any triggers and you could hear lombardo and those guys fcuking slaying the drums.


same with jazz drummers..... sometimes they play really fast stuff and most of them aren't using triggers.


I could be wrong though.

The way that most metal drummers use triggers is only to enhance the sound/cut of the drum for clarity and attack during double kick parts, or like Morgan Rose of Sevendust, to add synth or effects when he triggers the sound. The trigger itself isn't going to fix bad timing or sloppy performance.

 

[Soundguy213]

why do so many people seem to think triggers help a drummer stay in time with tough drum patterns? its sound reinforcement technique, not timing correction.

 

[maddnotez]

why do so many people seem to think triggers help a drummer stay in time with tough drum patterns? its sound reinforcement technique, not timing correction.

+2

Its about the sound. If anything it hurts the playing if you get a cheap trigger that misfires.

Im done with this thread.

 

[thiswaythatway]

Maybe John Mayers band should have used some of these cheating techniques when they tried to play Panama then it wouldn't have sounded like a total trainwreck.

 

[glassjaw7]

why do so many people seem to think triggers help a drummer stay in time with tough drum patterns? its sound reinforcement technique, not timing correction.

+2

Its about the sound.

+1,000,000!!! What I've been trying to say...

My guitar "trick" is that I put EB Hybrid Slinkys on and it fixes all my mistakes and timing problems!

 

[Jordon]

Amen to Jordan, Might send you some drums to edit


You guys are getting rediculous in here.

I think triggers are used only for the sound not to magically make you Derek Roddy. (even he probably uses triggers).

Most good bands edit tracks plain and simple.

Send em over, man! I'm pretty damn reasonable with my rates, and I'll cut you the Rig-Talk family discount

 

[rottingcorpse]

"triggers are cheating".......uninformed elitist thinking. no different from using a re-amp track.

timing, and tightness.

personally, i don't care if you record with a drum machine or program. i don't care if you go into protools and fix every little mistake on every track, or you do it live onto an old tascam 4 track porta-studio. i don't care if you use tube, solid state, or axefx. i don't even care if you tune down to z-flat, as long as the note progression and rhythm is understandable, no matter how complex.

there is a ton of modern metal out there that kicks all kindsa ass. lots of insane young players out here pushing the boundries of metal. drummers that are tearing it up. bass players who.....well, never mind.

i am really digging the new threat signal cd.

 

[technomancer]

why do so many people seem to think triggers help a drummer stay in time with tough drum patterns? its sound reinforcement technique, not timing correction.

I'm a bit mystified myself... why would playing through an electronic kit or triggers on an acoustic kit magically make the playing different from mic'ing the drums.... you still have to play them. A lot of the new bands using triggers and software like Superior Drummer are doing it because it's a hell of a lot cheaper to hook up an electronic kit than to have to have a good room and a ton of expensive mics to record good acoustic drums.

Periphery for example went this route on the first album IIRC as it saved money, but their drummer has no problems playing the material live.

 

[Code001]

why do so many people seem to think triggers help a drummer stay in time with tough drum patterns? its sound reinforcement technique, not timing correction.

I'm a bit mystified myself... why would playing through an electronic kit or triggers on an acoustic kit magically make the playing different from mic'ing the drums.... you still have to play them. A lot of the new bands using triggers and software like Superior Drummer are doing it because it's a hell of a lot cheaper to hook up an electronic kit than to have to have a good room and a ton of expensive mics to record good acoustic drums.

Periphery for example went this route on the first album IIRC as it saved money, but their drummer has no problems playing the material live.

Divinity used an electronic kit, too. Props to Sacha for his explanation and sexy good looks:

 

[JTyson]

why do so many people seem to think triggers help a drummer stay in time with tough drum patterns? its sound reinforcement technique, not timing correction.

I'm a bit mystified myself... why would playing through an electronic kit or triggers on an acoustic kit magically make the playing different from mic'ing the drums.... you still have to play them. A lot of the new bands using triggers and software like Superior Drummer are doing it because it's a hell of a lot cheaper to hook up an electronic kit than to have to have a good room and a ton of expensive mics to record good acoustic drums.

Periphery for example went this route on the first album IIRC as it saved money, but their drummer has no problems playing the material live.

Divinity used an electronic kit, too. Props to Sacha for his explanation and sexy good looks:

Thats exactly what we are doing, but we use real cymbals with overhead mikes, usually AKG C414's
Russ cant stand the feel of the V-cymbals, they bounce differently than real ones. The V-drums do too, but it dosent bother him as much

 

[Atropos_Project]

As said earlier, triggers are used to get a very specific sound.. a sloppy drummer is still going to sound sloppy with it. Even for non-metal bands, you'll hear a lot of drummers using triggers because it allows for a more consistent sound from venue to venue.

There's also the fact that when you play extremely fast, you're also not hitting very hard (hellooo physics)... so in some cases, double bass work sort of loses it's definition when heard without triggers (sort of how a snare buzz roll doesn't have individual hit definition when played on a loose snare). This is even more noticeable on a kit where it's one kick drum and a slave pedal setup.

I use a similar setup to the Brokeband video, but with a Trapkat drum trigger instead of a v-drum kit. It's passable, but if I had a competent mic setup for my acoustic kit, I'd switch over and ditch the software side permanently. As good as the samples are, you can still pick up on the fact that they're being triggered, depending on what's being played, if you know what to listen for. Admittedly, in 'most' scenarios it's rather difficult.

Personally, I prefer a kit to actually sound like a kit, in a room, played by a person, with all its flaws and less-than-optimal details. I'm beyond tired of what's pretty much the standard metal drum sound these days. Zero dynamics, etc. *yawn*.