Jeff Evans
Thanks Ben for your thoughts. The feel thing is elusive for sure. So drums can play ahead of time or the beat. Think of a person standing up very straight and leaning forward. (Like Michael Jackson does in his dancing in Smooth Criminal) That is what that is like. Not all the drum sounds are in the same spot. But some parts are hitting the time early and others can follow. Then you are doing maybe a slow blues in triplet time. Playing behind the beat gives this type of groove a real nice feeling too. (Person now leaning back) Then there is perfect quantised time. e.g. Jean Michelle Jarre in his latest Oxygen 3 album. I love the way he creates very interesting and complex beats with his electronic drum machines but they are all in perfect quantised on the grid time. It is just best for that music. Where everything else is as well. Live drums sound silly in this context.
Grooves can move from ahead to behind and in the pocket all within the same tune. I have tried analysing the hits and it can be hard to see where the groove actually is. It can sound great but then the hits can look random too. Take someone like Steve Gadd playing in perfect time to a click. How come I know it is him every time. Not just sounds here but the types of things he plays obviously.
Live drums are a bit like a violin. Yes there are great virtual violin instruments now but try and sequence something using midi like real player and see how damn hard it is. Maybe it is the love that goes into the playing. Now there is an elusive quality. Bit like cooking and putting lots of love in at the same time. It seems to stay in the dish right up to the point of the food being eaten.
I did like the piano sound in your link too. I think you did a good job with that. I like Grand Rhapsody though for sure. To me it just sounds excellent. Did you download the high res version of the samples. They sound great as well. It does take a little time to load a sound but once it has it is fine for the rest of the session.
Hiya Jeff, absolutely...one of the most important things I read almost 20 years ago was a quote from Elton John, who said it was about putting notes inbetween one another or something along those lines. To do this though in a digital sense is a lot harder. Recently to achieve this, what I've started to do is divide the drum midi track into kick, snare, toms and cyms, then cut those midi tracks at various sections where I then add quantize and velocity midi plugs...This allows me to push and pull a track...much like a 'track'. If you listened to the link, you would have heard the tom fills, which I based on Moon, indeed got harder as the track went on. This was only my second or third attempt at trying this technique...so it wasn't perfect, but the technique does add to the drum track. A more early successful attempt at this technique was on When Every Song Is Sung my George Harrison track. One of the keys to The Beatles groove is Ringo's backbeat, whereas Paul McCartney is pushing...So ringo sits just behind the best, whereas Paul sits just in front. I achieved this, what let's down the track is Session Drummer 3 because it doesn't have the nuances of a really good multisample virtual drum instrument.
Another really cool thing I've learned recently, and thanks to Wave's lol is how to use different flavour compressors. Because of my ASD extremely high functioning lol, but because of my ASD...when something almost worked I stick with it because I believe the code will eventually reveal itself and work. So I stick with a few compressors because id nail a mix or a master every 3 or 4 times. But I struggled to repeat that success. A couple of months ago, because Wave's kept putting up plugs I wanted for 30 bucks I completely overhauled my plugin range, and started to experiment wildly...Something that's a bit hard even with high functioning ASD. What I discovered was, both the Fairchild limiter and Neve VComp clone could do particular things to the sonic signature of the drums. Yes this is obvious, but how and when do you use these types of sounds was and is the key to all young and aspiring engineers, because when the hardware units were introduced the engineers of the day only had one or two of these units and had to learn these devices like an instrument to get the best out of said units. I've now figured this out, and it is also key in getting that sound in regards to drums...both recorded and samples. After I worked out sonic signatures of these units, I then started to use these compressors on the master buss, which also worked and solved another problem. I'd got stuck using Wave's HComp as my master compressor, but it's a bugger to set, I chucked Waves Fairchild across the master buss to complete my When Every Song experiment (I'd brought Wave's TG12345 channel strip/nls console emulation) and mixed the entirety of the track with both these plugs, and mastered to see how close these plugs sounded like the real thing...to my surprise...it was extremely close.
My point is, and it ties in with the idea of virtuosity, is I'm advocating digital virtuosity. So while I'm trying to emulate every type of music...almost, I'm not trying to emulate to the point it sounds exactly the same, because you can't...but you can emulate every type of music and sound there is and nudge it along to make something that sounds familiar but sounds entirely new at the same time, by being a magpie and stealing across the musical ages. For example I'm working on Sonata no.6, which I've written For cello, viola, violn, piano, vocals, guitar and various percussion. I'm also using Wave's wavetable synth to create an electronic cello to double the cello line. I've also written a drum part, which I've almost modeled on a type of hip hop and Latin type of music. I've written the piece in 2/4 which helps.
Ben