it's that easy.
The band for which I'm doomed to be remembered is Sparge. A group of idiots (I am one of the idiots) get together for a weekend and write and record a bunch of dumb, dumb shit. Then I spend six months mixing it. Then Brad spends a few months sequencing it into a record. Then we all listen to the result and giggle and base a year's worth of inside jokes on it.
All that work and nobody ever hears this stuff but us. We have a handful of adoring fans, most of them professional musicians (which makes no sense) but were we to actually release anything, the lawsuits would be overwhelming . Also, nobody would get the inside jokes and that's really all there is.
Yet I'm currently mixing Sparge's sixth record. Which we recorded a year ago (remember the PJ Harvey thing?), but I've been busy so get off my back.
For this one, thirteen(!?!) of us convened in NYC to record at lovely Kampo Studios. Also, we decided that all participants had to grow mustaches.
To drive 5 people and gear from DC to NYC, we rented a van, but we got a GMC Yukon. The Yukon wouldn't play our iPod cassette adapter, but magically, the Yukon's CD player contained Linkin Park's latest CD. So that was all we listened to for six hours. Brain melty.
Midway through the 3-day session, we're running out of ideas as usual. And of course someone's all "let's do a linkin park thing!". Somehow I was sitting at the drum kit, so I ended up playing drums while Brad -- you know, Brad the great drummer -- stood in the vocal booth and screamed "I got the crabs! VD all over me!" for the chorus. That's not even funny.
All that to get to the point. Here I am, rocking a chorus: sukin gse
I play drums once every six months. As Brad says, I'm too good to be funny-bad, and too crappy to be useful. Some things to note about my performance:
- Drum sounds rock. Room sounds great, kick and snare are solid, Greg is a great engineer.
- I am terrible. Time is but a magazine, I can't hit consistently, I decide that a fill isn't such a good idea when I'm already midway through the fill, etc.
- The snare never really sounds like a snare should sound. I can give you a recording of me simply hitting a snare drum with a drum stick, and one of Brad doing the same thing, and they sound completely different.
- Overall I sound like the drummer on one of those CDs a guy at work gives you.
While mixing this brilliant number, I decided that I might as well go for that tweaked out, over-over-dubbed, quantized, pitch corrected, completely inhuman production that has sold 35 million Linkin Park CDs. And everything starts at the drums.
After a half hour of slicing and dicing in Cubase, here I am ready for the drum riser and 100,000 screaming fans: linkin gse
It's not a great example because I hardly even tried, but note:
- Timing is metronomic.
- Drum sounds (the kick and snare hits) are samples from the same kit, in the same room, played by a good drummer. Yeah, it sounds a bit like a drum machine, especially without a wall of guitars and angst-ridden vocals, but that's what everyone expects. Pay attention to the drums next time you hear Linkin Park or Nickelback or any of the other big-label rock out there. And it's easy enough to vary up the samples to make them more, er, "human".
- That took me a half hour and I'm the worst drummer in the world and we didn't even play to a click.
Q: What does a Protools engineer say after the first take?
A: "That sucked, come on in."