Tempo Obsession

Wow, all over the map here (pun intended).

Is this an album or a demo situation? If it's an album meant for release, make it perfect or else it will bug you for the rest of your days and give you cause for doubts and excuses and insecurities of every sort. Every time you listen to it you're going to hear the shortcomings. There are so many tools that make it incredibly easy to edit drums in the computer-based studio that there is really no reason for them to not be perfect. Even if you have to edit every single drum hit by hand, on the computer that takes what, maybe one weekend to correct an entire album? That's the easy part.

Something that is brought up by the general tenor and gist of your post though, is whether you really have a clear idea in your head of what "perfect" should sound like. The fact that you are talking about out-of-time parts having a better "feel" is highly suspect in this regard. More in a moment.

At the risk of offending drummers, drums in typical popular music tracks are not a terribly "feel"-laden instrument. I.e. there is not that much difference between the sound of kick drum hit when it's played by legendary drummer of your choice vs played by first-day drum student. What conveys "feel" to the drum part is where the hits are located in time and how hard they are hit, and as a rule, most popular music drummers tend to hit pretty hard and pretty consistently. I mean, if you're looking Max Roach-type drumming then DIY and drumagog are clearly not the right approach. (Cymbals may be a slightly different story-- we'll get to that)

So... if you have some recorded drum hits that you are happy with AND you have a clear idea of where on the timeline those drum hits should be, it really isn't that hard to put them there.

Now, back to this idea of "feel"/imperfect timing:

There is nothing wrong with having a bit of ebb and flow to the tempo in a song, indeed it is quite common for the band to speed up a little before the chorus or whatever and to slow down a little for the softer parts. It IS, however a problem if the drums are not in lockstep with the bass and other instruments. Moreover, it should not sound "wrong" as you say it does. Second, there is a big difference between being "out of time" and swing/working the beat/playing in the pocket/etc. My guess is that your live drum tracks are to some degree or another finding the pocket in ways that the drumagog'ed ones are not. My guess is further that your live drum tracks are not consistently finding the pocket and/or are sometimes confusing the pocket with the actual beat, and therefore shifting tempos as a result.

There are a lot of ways to skin this cat. The easiest and best to simply hire a studio musician. There are folks who will do real drum tracks entirely online for pretty reasonable money, I think SteveD from this forum is one such.

If that's not a realistic option for whatever reason, then you'll have to decide what degree of comprimise you're willing and able to make, based on your own abilities. It takes some degree of skill and practice to do midi drums or drum editing well, but mostly it just takes clearly knowing what you want the drums to sound like and then apply ass to chair. The tricky part is not the editing these days, it's identifying where the hits are really supposed to fall, and only you can really evaluate whether you're up to making that decision well enough to satisfy.

One thing I would encourage all home producer/non-drummer types to do is to get into the habit of always identifying and tapping along with the backbeat when listening to recorded music. Use your right hand or foot to tap the kick drum and your left to tap the snare part. The snare drum is almost always on the two and the four, and the kick hits on or suggests the one and the three. The backbeat is the most elemental and basic component of virtually all the music on the radio, and while it's not usually complicated, developing a sensitivity to how different drummers work it will not only catapult the quality of your midi drums, it will also open your eyes in new and unexpected ways to the entire realm of popular music.

If you can get a solid kick/snare pattern going with either real or sampled drums, then the rest of it has a tendency to fall into place. It's generally okay for cymbals, fills, and hi-hat work to be a little more loosey-goosey as long as that steady crack of the backbeat keeps going, and moreover, a solid kick/snare foundation will make it easy to identify ouright mistakes vs "expressive" timing. Indeed, the shortest route to DIY "real drums" for mediocre drummers might be to tap out a steady kick/snare pattern on a keyboard or drum machine, then go into the studio and play along with that.

Last but not least, and FWIW, it is not an uncommon approach these days to use either electronic drums or triggers for all the drums, but real cymbals, tracked either together or seperately. Cymbals and particularly hihats are generally the most vulnerable to sounding "electronic." If the drummer is fond of side-sticking or ghost strokes, then the snare should usually be real as well.

cheers.

Hi esmail1,

In reading this thread, a few things struck me:

1) Although I'm not a drummer, I've heard from others what yep said about some parts of drums being dead-on and other parts being allowed a little bit of play --- very little. Most of it has to be dead on for pop.

2) I can't help but wondering if you've EQ'd the tracks before listening. If your timing is dead on, then crucial sounds from the drums may get buried --- enough so that they don't sound good any more. I'll have to leave it to yep and other mixing experts to provide advice here. You could also search this forum for tips.

3) It also struck me that your patterns may be a bit too vanilla. Real drummers get bored easily, as I understand it, so mix things up.

Regards,
Dave Clark

P.S. and a little OT: There is a fascinating, engrossing, long biography of Keith Moon (actually about The Who and rock in the 60's and 70's) by Tony Fletcher. I highly recommend it. I also just watched the new television documentary about The Who which aired here for the first time (I believe) last night. Also fascinating.

On edit: Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend (1999). I read the hardcover one.

# Hardcover: 608 pages
# Publisher: William Morrow; 1st ed edition (February 1, 1999)
# ISBN-10: 0380973375
# ISBN-13: 978-0380973378

Thanks for the replies. This is melodic pop/rock with commercial type hooks, lyrics etc. The focus is (should be) on the songwriting, my vocals and the guitar licks, which are my forte.

Production wise, when I cut the drums......I was hoping for a drum sound similar to The The's "Mind Bomb"...if you are not familiar with that album check it out....Matt Johnson is absolutely incredible as a producer and he got some great sounds out of the drums for that 1989 album. Check it out here:

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Bomb/dp/B000068TOC/ref=pd_bbs_3/104-5671295-9449546?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1194210399&sr=8-3

Maybe it was the bottle of wine that I had last night before posting that, which made me seem a bit rambling.... lol

If it's an album meant for release, make it perfect or else it will bug you for the rest of your days and give you cause for doubts and excuses and insecurities of every sort.

Yes, this is a commercial release. The songs are all done except for the drums, percussion overdubs and some final guitar parts. The instrumentation consists of more organic sounds such as guitars, piano, organ, some synths etc.

I did edit the drums in Adobe Audition, beat by beat in some cases (took a number of weeks of work to do this...very tedious).... and it generally sounds "good" I just guess that Im not happy overall but should be.... Im OK with the sound, and EQ/compression is not the issue...im more concerned with the feel.

I hear lots of commercial releases where they are getting some great grooves out of samples....so I was just wondering how you all did it....whether you stick to the same tempo over and over in the song or not....and what you are using to build a track via samples and have it sound good...

as usual, yep pretty much explained it. a fast song that's behind the beat will always feel slower than a slower song that's ahead of the beat. a little bit of swing will go a long way into getting people in the groove. the problem with midi-based stuff isn't that the tempo is perfect, it's that the timing is "perfect" or rather, boring.

The swing is so important. Probably a lot of people when they hear swing think jazz and figure it has nothing to do with rock music, with its straight ahead beats, but it still is really important. It's not as obviously swingy as big band jazz, but there's a certain swing to a lot of rock music and if all the instruments are not in that groove, it doesn't sound right. There's something about that swing feeling, when it's really really working, that even in a hard tune, just sucks the listener along, as though the whole thing is falling downhill towards some inevitable and satisfying place.

And this is the hardest thing I have to deal with when tracking. If I'm trying to track a part that's tough for me to play because it's kind of at either the edge of my abilities or the edge of my ability to recreate repeatedly for doubling or punching in, the first thing that seems to get lost is the swing. It's so tempo sensitive and when you are stuggling to play something, you aren't just feeling that groove and flowing with it.

Are you using a drum pad to play the drums? For me, that's really the secret to it. I really do 'play' my drums when I track them, I don't use any loops. It really does make for a much more realistic and nuanced drum track.

ORIGINAL: droddey
Are you using a drum pad to play the drums? For me, that's really the secret to it. I really do 'play' my drums when I track them, I don't use any loops. It really does make for a much more realistic and nuanced drum track.

no, i quantize by hand... i've gotten some decent results that way, but it takes forever, and so i never spend the kind of time to get it "right." i do have a keyboard but my keyboarding skills are quite rusty and my p4 and low latency don't get along. i've thought about a drum pad, just haven't gotten around to trying one out.

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no, i quantize by hand... i've gotten some decent results that way, but it takes forever, and so i never spend the kind of time to get it "right." i do have a keyboard but my keyboarding skills are quite rusty and my p4 and low latency don't get along. i've thought about a drum pad, just haven't gotten around to trying one out.

A drum pad makes all the difference. A keyboard is almost impossible to really play drums on. There's so much travel on the keys that it's not at all like hitting a drum. It takes a while to get fluent on a drum pad, but you really can get enormously more realistic results. I'm using a padKontrol which is nice, but it takes a fair amount of restraint because the pads are pretty sensitive, even with the sensitivity cranked all the way down. It's easy to just start pounding when you are getting into it. But, the good side is that if you develop that light touch, you can much more easily do multi-finger playing instead of just the index finger on each hand type of thing.

Have you ever thought about investing in a Roland V drum set. #1 this will not bug your neibors and the v drums alsmost feel like your playing regular drums. #2 you wont have to worry about mic'ing and th eplacement of mic's and the time it taskes to get it right. #3 you can get something like BFD or EZdrummer to get your samples from #4 you wont have to pre record anymore and cut and paste fills.
I use them and i like them and this way you still get the live feel instead of the robot grooves you get when cutting and pasting pre existing patterns.
Cj

What is Zendrum. Dont tell me, ill look it up
Cj

Holy Cow, Dean! v cool! now how can I talk the little lady into letting me have one? Well, Christmas is coming up...

As someone pointed out in another thread, there's no way that someone is going to be thrown off by a 2ms delay. I didn't check his math, but I assume he was correct in calculating that it takes about 3ms just for the sound from the live drums to get to the drummer's ears when playing a real drums set, because of travel time at the speed of sound. If that's correct, it seems unlikely that if 3ms is present in the real live environment, which I'm sure to any drummer sounds instantaneous, then 2ms is not remotely noticeable. I think people always think that they have greater abilities to discern these things than they really do when tested.

Also, if that's correct, BTW, in a close mic'd situation, the sound being recorded would actually a couple ms *ahead* of what the drummer is hearing from his own drums.

Even then though, it still kind of applies. If there's a 3ms delay in live drumming, just to the drummer himself, not to mention the other musicians who are reacting to it, then a 2 ms offset of the drum track would be tiny. If you look at doing fake double tracking, you have to delay one copy of the track more than a few ms just to keep it from collapsing to a center image completely, because a couple ms is so small a time that we don't hear any meaningful difference between arrival time to the left and right ear.

ORIGINAL: droddey

no, i quantize by hand... i've gotten some decent results that way, but it takes forever, and so i never spend the kind of time to get it "right." i do have a keyboard but my keyboarding skills are quite rusty and my p4 and low latency don't get along. i've thought about a drum pad, just haven't gotten around to trying one out.

A drum pad makes all the difference. A keyboard is almost impossible to really play drums on. There's so much travel on the keys that it's not at all like hitting a drum. It takes a while to get fluent on a drum pad, but you really can get enormously more realistic results. I'm using a padKontrol which is nice, but it takes a fair amount of restraint because the pads are pretty sensitive, even with the sensitivity cranked all the way down. It's easy to just start pounding when you are getting into it. But, the good side is that if you develop that light touch, you can much more easily do multi-finger playing instead of just the index finger on each hand type of thing.

not a bad price on the padkontrol... might be worth it for me in the time it would save. i hate trying to lay down a groove by hand, i'd much rather tap it in.