Electronica Rock drums

[newguy12]

I have a friend who wants to record some rockish synthy songs, the problem is I have no idea how to go about doing the drums. Most of what I've done in the past and the majority of the stuff I play and listen to features acoustic drums played by real drummers. Although I'm not much of a drummer I had my friend burn a few tracks of what he was looking for (he gave me a mix of radiohead and flaming lips tracks with a few others I'm not familiar with) and I sat down at my kit (I'm not much of a drummer but I can play) and I tried to figure a few things out with no luck. I then tried to sample some hits and arrange them on my computer, run them through some overdrive and filters to mess them up a bit and couldn't get anything to sound coherent. My friend has fruity loops which I've never used but he complains he can't get anything to sound more natural and that everything he has made comes off sounding quite techno-y. Hence any suggestions, links to websites etc would be a huge help.

[scarygroover]

Hey there new guy,

are you using a recording program? if so, make track a copy of the bottom snare mic(assuming you use a top and a bottom mic) put an amp simulating plug in on the copied bottom snare track. gate it. voila! instant flaming lips radiohead smashy drum sounds.

good luck,
Michael

[Mr. Dipity]

I have a friend who wants to record some rockish synthy songs, the problem is I have no idea how to go about doing the drums. Most of what I've done in the past and the majority of the stuff I play and listen to features acoustic drums played by real drummers. Although I'm not much of a drummer I had my friend burn a few tracks of what he was looking for (he gave me a mix of radiohead and flaming lips tracks with a few others I'm not familiar with) and I sat down at my kit (I'm not much of a drummer but I can play) and I tried to figure a few things out with no luck. I then tried to sample some hits and arrange them on my computer, run them through some overdrive and filters to mess them up a bit and couldn't get anything to sound coherent. My friend has fruity loops which I've never used but he complains he can't get anything to sound more natural and that everything he has made comes off sounding quite techno-y. Hence any suggestions, links to websites etc would be a huge help.

Here is one of my favourite treasures, for you all to share.

1. Record a 4 bar tracklive on your drums.
2. In your DAW, place all the tracks in a folder, or alternately, mix to 2 track.
3. Divide your 4 bars at each 16th note. Most popular DAWs have a function for this. Alternately, use Phatmatic Pro to do this for you.
4. Rearrange the splices to make insane 'natural' drum 'loops' that aren't natural sounding at all.

For extra credit, run through your VST mangler of choice, such as PSP84, or digital fishphones compressor.

[newguy12]

Thanks so much for the tips I'm gonna go try them out. Any suggestions on patterns, I'm so used to doing variations on the whole kick on the 1 beat, snare on the 3rd beat with 1/4 note high hat hits and the occasional fill. I think I figured out the Lips snare drum roll aka marching band kinda beat but I can't quite get some of the more unconventional beats to really sound right. I know a better drummer wouldn't have any problem tackling these things but I'm more of a guitar guy and my friend plays piano so although we got some rhythem neither one of us really things like a drummer in terms of actual patters/beats.

[meblumen]

I was just listening to Yoshimi battles the Pink Robots Pt.1 off the album of the same name and the drumming is pretty straight forward rock type stuff, don't let the sounds of the drums intimidate you, but there even pretty normal sounding. As for sounds, distort/overdrive those overheads, if you got a speaker you can use to mic the kick drum try that, I've always really like that for this type of sound. For an alternative to distorting the snares or in addition to it, record the snare normal, then run it out through a speaker which you place facing down on the snare drum. Record the sound from the underside and blend to taste or do it twice and pan them (can't remember who brought this trick up a little while ago it was mentioned in a post and I;ve come to really like it both getting normal sounds as well as some fucked up ones). You might need to loosen the snares a bit to get it to really ring out but there is so much you can do to the sound, running it through (you mentioned you play guitar) various pedals, some drastic eq or anything. You might even want to reverse a few cymbal hits or whatnot to really get that electronica thing going.

[JohnDavisNYC]

one thing that I know both bands mentioned do, is sample their drummer, and then re sequence them.... alot of the sound of that is a sampler that isn't full bandwidth or fidelity. a good example is Airbag off of OK computer. that's Phil's drums dropped into an Akai (mpc2000, i believe? or an S2000) and re programmed, and super compressed and filtered and distorted. try sending the drums through a bus, distorting it, and playing around with a nice low-pass filter and blending that with the original.. that's all over Airbag. it's mostly the cut up feel of the truncated samples, though. chop up your drums, import the first few bars of Airbag into your DAW, and start transcribing the drums... make your samples line up with theirs... you'll quickly learn what makes the programming happen.

john

[newguy12]

I think the main problem for most of what I'm doing is my drum programming abilities. I've tried some of the tricks you guys have mentioned and in terms of getting cool drum sounds they have been a huge help. I've just never programmed drums before, I usually just track real drummers, once in a while I have to make an edit here and there which in all honesty takes me a while and I often find very difficult and fustrating. I'm using Cubase SX, the only sampler I have is Halion which I was using to sample some of my hits. Outside of that I have a few plugins, some outboard gear but no outboard drum machines or samplers. Any suggestions on programming drums in the vein of Flaming Lips, Radiohead or toaster any tracks you recommend in particular that have really overt drums that either overshadow the rest of the mix or are the only thing present for a portion that I can use to model my own sounds from. Thanks again to everyone whose helped, I'm getting there, I just need a few more helpful suggestions to really get what I'm after.

[newguy12]

I just read over my last post and I didn't think I was very clear, basically my digital editing capabilities are kinda lacking and I've been having difficulty chopping up my samples and then piecing them back together into anything that resembles a drum beat. So any guides or recommendations you can extend to me would be great.

[JohnDavisNYC]

listening and imitation, as with all aspects of music, are fundamental to developing a vocabulary. try to imitate what you hear, and if you can't, be hyper-analytical about why you can't, and figure it out. i could show you a thing or two if we were in the same room, but it's much better for you to figure it out on your own. buy a squarepusher cd and analyze that programming... you'll realize how simple and obvious (although still amazing) Flaming Lips and Radiohead are. I wish i could tell you a quick fix, but there isn't one, that i know of.

cheers,
john

[discs of tron]

there's no quick fix, but recycle is pretty cool. you basically import a bar of your drummer groovin, and it handles the choppin up. each "slice" of your chopped beat can be moved around, tempo can be changed, etc. it's worth looking at. i use it in combination with reason, and it works really well. i thought cubase sx was supposed to include some sort of loop-mangling plug-in now too. cubase will import the ".rex" files that recycle puts out. it's also really easy to take a recycle loop and augment it by layering other sampled or synthesized hits atop the original hits.