The morals of using drum samples

jnTracks · Post by **jnTracks** » Fri Feb 11, 2011 3:55 am

samples are best when they're mixed with the real kit. surely this is what his favorite bands do, so just do that.

i don't understand the "moral" issue at all. it's music. what, exactly, is your job? to do your best to get the clients music sounding the best way they want it to?
i think you can tell the client what you think will sound the best and why you think that, but it's their call, right? i mean, if they want it to sound bad you can't be loosing sleep over it. too much stress!

casey campbell · Post by **casey campbell** » Fri Feb 11, 2011 6:47 am

wow, ok...i've been giving this thing alot of thought too.

here are my opinions (for what it's worth):

1. a recording is like dressing up fancy for a date after you've been married for 20 years. she knows that you look like a chunker naked, but you dress up anyway to put your best foot forward.

2. replacing or blending samples for cruddy drums that sound like someone smacking tupperware is not bad. tuning vocals isn't bad either. messing around with someone else's woman is bad. lying is bad. murdering someone is pretty bad too.

you have to keep in mind that you are taking someone's best effort (hopefully), and making it the best it can possibly be. you are investing your time and effort...you are building people.

3. i thank God for melodyne on a daily basis. drumagog is wonderful! i think drums that are totally replaced sound un-natural...but the blend option is really cool, and i have yet to find anyone that can "hear" it, other than to say that their drums sound great when it's done.

4. do you feel the same way about re-amping? hmmmm. i would venture to guess that most people think reamping is great, but they have an issue with drum replacement. maybe it's how scary digital technology is getting now a days. how about eq'ing? certainly you have no issue with eq'ing an instrument, and yet it has the power (potentially) to make something sound alot bigger and fuller. or how about adding reverb. certainly most people aren't fooled into thinking that vocal really happened in large concert hall right?

gavintheaudioengineer · Post by **gavintheaudioengineer** » Sat Feb 12, 2011 10:19 am

Perhaps my problem is that I'm judging drum replacement on the poor examples I've heard.

Anyone care to recommend any listening on tracks where it's been done well?

jnTracks · Post by **jnTracks** » Sun Feb 13, 2011 6:25 am

dare i say: most major label rock records in the last 15 years?

how about, if it's on a major label and the drums sound natural to you, than the drum "replacement" was done "well".

just do the replacement on duplicate tracks and mix the tracks with the unaffected tracks. i think "replacement" is sort of the wrong word for how it's done. in fact, there's probably multiple samples of the kick and snare layered on these records. different ones are louder in the chorus and the verse, ect.

biggator6 · Post by **biggator6** » Mon Feb 14, 2011 4:28 pm

gavintheaudioengineer wrote:Perhaps my problem is that I'm judging drum replacement on the poor examples I've heard.

Anyone care to recommend any listening on tracks where it's been done well?

I like the Andy Wallace trick - use the real drum sounds, and send samples to effects (heavily carved up with EQ)..

Otherwise, I know what you mean about sample replacement.. I'd rather try harder and make real drums sound real.

decocco · Post by **decocco** » Mon Feb 21, 2011 10:45 am

Pretty much anything mixed by Andy Wallace has drum samples augmenting the real drums.

Also, his mixes generally sound amazing, so he must be doing something right.

honkyjonk · Post by **honkyjonk** » Mon Feb 21, 2011 5:31 pm

Is being fake immoral?
I'm sure many people would say being dishonest is.

I say fuck the radio. Fuck everything whereby horrible music is perpetuated. I think people are very easily tricked into acquiescing to the idea that they don't have to make the music, they just have to have the idea. Fuck that.

I think it's great to bring this to some sort of realm of metaphysical discussion because pitch, rhythm, and timbre are all correctable now. If you're okay with that, then you're part of the problem.

Oh, it's not you Mr. Recording Engineer being dishonest, you're just helping someone else be dishonest. That's a much easier pill to swallow?

Nowadays overdubbing is (almost) unanimously accepted as part of the process of recording a song. Yeah, the same song that was written and has always been sung accompanied at the same time with the performer's instrument is now going to be separated out and recorded individually. I don't know about everyone else but that is still a mind fuck for me. I can't even begin to imagine how we got to where we are now, letting a piece of art be raped with some Bob Clearmountain drum sample.

I'm not saying we all need to go back to hunting and gathering, but music sounded better and was better in the past because of people, together, in a room, operating under the inherent emotion in the story of the song.

Here's a quote from David Briggs, Neil Young's many time producer, from 'Shakey', his biography:

"The biggest moment of my life-the one I haven't been able to get past ever, really- is 1961, when I first got to L.A. I got invited to Radio Recorders to see Ray Charles, and I walk into the studio, and Ray's playin' all the piano parts with his left hand, reading a braille score with his right hand, singing the vocal live while a full orchestra played behind him. So I sat there and I watched. And I went, 'This is how records are made. Put everybody in the fuckin' room and off we go.' In those days everybody knew they had to go in, get their dick hard at the same time and deliver. And three hours later they walked out the fuckin' door with a record in their pocket, man.
Of course, in those days they didn't have eight, sixteen, twenty-four, forty eight, sixty four track recording ad nauseum, to fuck people up, and this what fucked up the recording business and the musicians of today, by the way-fucked 'em all up to where they'll never be the same, in my opinion. People realized they could do their part . . . later. Play their part and fix it later. And with rock and roll, the more you think, the more you stink."

jnTracks · Post by **jnTracks** » Mon Feb 21, 2011 5:58 pm

that's quite a rant, but ray charles greatness wasn't created by limited recording means, he succeeded in spite of those limitations.
the method by which music is recorded has nothing to do with how good it is. music was never better because it was harder to record it. if your argument was true than all the musicians you think were so great from that era would be terrible today because things are different and we have overdubs. do you think that's true?

farview · Post by **farview** » Mon Feb 21, 2011 6:08 pm

If you are looking to be entertained only by the pure of heart, be prepared for a lot of boredom.

Who says a real drum sound is what is called for in a given piece of music?

Who is the engineer to tell the artist what their art is supposed to sound like and what tools they are allowed to use?

Would you not let a keyboardist play anything other than a piano, organ or harpsichord because they are the only 'real' instruments with keys?

There are plenty of styles of music that require non-'real' sounds. And yes, keyboard strings don't sound like real strings. But, by the same token, real strings don't sound like keyboard strings.

If the arrangement calls for key strings, they should be used. If the sound the band is after needs drum samples, they should be used.

BTW, replacing the drum hits with samples doesn't have anything to do with quantizing or otherwise fixing the preformance. It is not a sign of weakness on the drummers part. It has no corelation to the drummers talent, or even the engineers talent for that matter.

If everyone had all the time in the world, a giant budget and access to every possible drum, mic, room, etc... then it might be a different story... That is, assuming the sound the band wants could even be made in the real world with a drum, mic and some processing.

I remember working on a album a very long time ago. Days and days of vocal takes just to get everything perfect. The vocalist flew home and the next day we notice a bad note. We made the guy get back on a plane and punch in that one note. It took an hour or so to get his voice sounding the same way and to get him standing exactly the same in the room so it didn't sound like a punch in. Auto-tune would have saved a round trip plane ticket and a day of studio time at an expensive studio. No one in the audience would have known the difference.

chris harris · Post by **chris harris** » Mon Feb 21, 2011 6:57 pm

What a long, bullshit, dogmatic rant, birthed from the following steaming bullshit logical fallacy:

honkyjonk wrote:I'm not saying we all need to go back to hunting and gathering, but music sounded better and was better in the past because of people, together, in a room, operating under the inherent emotion in the story of the song.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!!!

It's nice that you have a hunch that things used to be so much better, and that the modern world is somehow to blame... It's just not true.

If you can't find great modern music, that sounds fucking fantastic, then the problem isn't the music of today. The problem is that you're too wrapped up in complaining about how much better things were in the old days, to get off of your ass and go find it.

I find these kind of rants absolutely pathetic. And I also consider them something of an insult. Who the fuck are you to decide what is and is not art?!?! Who the fuck are you to say what is art and what is "cheating"?.. So much bullshit.....

Once you've recorded anything at all, you're cheating. You're employing tricks with mics and placement, and gainstaging, and ambience, to try and represent the sound of musicians performing music live. Fucking cheater! You'll burn in Hell for this!!!

You should be embarrassed trying to pass off this "What I like is the only thing that's 'good'" bullshit.

engelen62 · Post by **engelen62** » Tue Feb 22, 2011 4:17 am

Isnt recording in itself by this definition cheating and immoral? When somebody listens to a recording the artist isnt there.. nobody is singing, its not real. It is an illusion just like multitrack recording, overdubbing, pitch correction, drumsamples etc..

pax

honkyjonk wrote:Is being fake immoral?
I'm sure many people would say being dishonest is.

I say fuck the radio. Fuck everything whereby horrible music is perpetuated. I think people are very easily tricked into acquiescing to the idea that they don't have to make the music, they just have to have the idea. Fuck that.

I think it's great to bring this to some sort of realm of metaphysical discussion because pitch, rhythm, and timbre are all correctable now. If you're okay with that, then you're part of the problem.

Oh, it's not you Mr. Recording Engineer being dishonest, you're just helping someone else be dishonest. That's a much easier pill to swallow?

Nowadays overdubbing is (almost) unanimously accepted as part of the process of recording a song. Yeah, the same song that was written and has always been sung accompanied at the same time with the performer's instrument is now going to be separated out and recorded individually. I don't know about everyone else but that is still a mind fuck for me. I can't even begin to imagine how we got to where we are now, letting a piece of art be raped with some Bob Clearmountain drum sample.

I'm not saying we all need to go back to hunting and gathering, but music sounded better and was better in the past because of people, together, in a room, operating under the inherent emotion in the story of the song.

Here's a quote from David Briggs, Neil Young's many time producer, from 'Shakey', his biography:

"The biggest moment of my life-the one I haven't been able to get past ever, really- is 1961, when I first got to L.A. I got invited to Radio Recorders to see Ray Charles, and I walk into the studio, and Ray's playin' all the piano parts with his left hand, reading a braille score with his right hand, singing the vocal live while a full orchestra played behind him. So I sat there and I watched. And I went, 'This is how records are made. Put everybody in the fuckin' room and off we go.' In those days everybody knew they had to go in, get their dick hard at the same time and deliver. And three hours later they walked out the fuckin' door with a record in their pocket, man.
Of course, in those days they didn't have eight, sixteen, twenty-four, forty eight, sixty four track recording ad nauseum, to fuck people up, and this what fucked up the recording business and the musicians of today, by the way-fucked 'em all up to where they'll never be the same, in my opinion. People realized they could do their part . . . later. Play their part and fix it later. And with rock and roll, the more you think, the more you stink."

casey campbell · Post by **casey campbell** » Tue Feb 22, 2011 6:40 am

i wonder if honkyjonk's wife or significant other is allowed to wear makeup?

i wonder if he used reverb....cheater! you know that vocal didn't happen in a hall somewhere!

i wonder if he's ever reamped?

i wonder if honkyjonk has ever edited a waveform? cheater!

JGriffin · Post by **JGriffin** » Tue Feb 22, 2011 8:43 am

subatomic pieces wrote:What a long, bullshit, dogmatic rant

+1. I was going to respond, but I know how I am, and I knew it would come out really harsh. Glad someone else decided to just go for it.

Bill @ Irie Lab · Post by **Bill @ Irie Lab** » Tue Feb 22, 2011 9:25 am

The studio is where it's game day for the artist.

As the engineer I want to use all the skill and resources at my disposal to enhance the artistic vision of the artist and present it in its best possible light.

Tools are tools and in music they are called instruments and recording gear.

Brian · Post by **Brian** » Tue Feb 22, 2011 9:46 am

It's not morals, it's "where has it lead in your experience over the years" for me.
The first group I recorded commercially replaced drums, and it was so commonly done, (1981) that no artist wanted it to come out that they were doing it, just like before autotune was known to exist by the general audience, it was taboo to talk about it outside sessions.
Why?
Because, back then, it was considered a very dishonest technique, like unannounced lipsyncing at a concert. If someone outside the studio had got wind of a vocal artists use of autotune, the would end their career, because most people think that if you are billing yourself as a vocalist, you should know how to sing your own damn material.
Are they right? To themselves, yes, to others, depends on whether they think in terms of "cheating" or not. Autotune was most used as a cheat back then, today it is a cheat and effect to disguize the invalidity of he cheat.
Personaly, I couldn't give a shit. I don't use it.
Why?
Because, I can't stand sitting behind a board listening to some hack massacre and eviscerate a tune all damn day, grating on my ears, knowing I'll have to spend endless days making them sound like Whitney frikkin Houston, (damn right I said it!), and get no mention I'd like for doing the dirty deed. I have better things to do than listen to hack "talent", like looking for real talent or developing it.
Bands in the old days (80's) used to say, "no fairlight" or "no synthesizers were used" yada yada = no loops, and who cares? Not me.

The way I see it, if I find someone with talent, that's what I'll record, I don't record much, I get asked to record a lot, lots of turn downs from me.
Don't sweat turning down clients you'd rather not record, if you're in a recording capitol, if not, and you plan to pay the rent with recording, it's gonna be a "job" full of "work" and you won't "love" it.
If I want to engage in dishonest behavior, I'll do movie sound, where it's completely expected and appreciated for what it is. FAKE.
Here's something to think about, if the artist didn't take the time to hone their skils on the instruments they are billing as, what makes you think working on their stuff would ever forward life one inch, even yours?

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The morals of using drum samples

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