This is the stuff I've been waiting for as it goes a long way in telling you the experience level of a drummer. I have not seen a pillow inside a kick drum since 1998 when I was in high school and it was another high schooler's beginner kit.
Isn't it past your bed time little boy? By 1998, I had spent 6 years in the Navy, Spent 6 years in College, and had several years of post college gigging under my belt ...... and had long since abandoned the pillow. Your statement shows your relative lack of experience. FYI, I haven't seen a pillow inside a kick since before 1998.
@OneEng; You seem to worry mostly about how a so called "FOH engineer" can make a shitty cover band consisting of mediocre musicians (including said "FOH engineer") playing mediocre versions of too often played cover songs can get away with the least effort sounding at least half decent on a ferry with too much liquor being served. In such a setting, I agree using today's e-drums instead of acoustic drums and your other takes perhaps could make some sense.
But when you want to experience real musicians playing live interacting with each other and with the audience, other factors than convenience for the "FOH engineer" come into play.
Fair enough. This is a similar argument to people not wanting to wear IEM's as well.
Lets abandon the "smaller venue gig" for just a minute. At the very top of the food chain, the majority of top touring bands are using triggers and either mixing the natural sound of the drums with the triggered sounds ..... or completely replacing the sound with the triggered sound. This is ironically (for this group) much more prevalent in metal bands (that impact I was talking about earlier). Of course jazz and blues are different.
Point is, why would top bands do this if samples were crap live?
Still, I can't disagree that for some groups, especially for those not using IEM's, the lack of energy on the stage could easily effect the way they play.
Which is why all bands should use IEM
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Okay. Maybe there's something to work with here. Let's say I don't even disagree. What I have been trying to say is, even if it is true, it is at the expense of severely affecting the musicianship and realism and authenticity of the band - which is very important in music.
Someone else mentioned cymbal swells before I think. But cymbal swells on an e-kit do not work very well. It is always a compromise and you really have to change your technique to stand even a hope in hell of making it sound good. Most of the time whenever I've recorded demos with drummers who do cymbal swells, if we're on an e-kit, they won't even bother playing those sections.
For certain styles of music, an e-kit severely compromises the quality of the output; no matter how good the mix is.
As above, you might well have a point about the musicianship, especially for bands not using IEM's.
Now you have me thinking about a couple of songs that we do that have swells in the original recording. I think the drummer uses a pad for it because I don't remember ever seeing him trying to do a roll on the cymbals. I am not ordinarily looking at the drummer when we play though.
Again, let's say I don't disagree. It also comes at a cost. For similar reasons. Take your Alesis video from earlier. There truly are some absolutely shit sounds in that brain. A rock band is going to be (here's that word again!) severely held back by some of those. Whereas most rock bands can get by with a cheapish Pearl Export kit; as long as it is tuned well and has good skins on it.
When you use an e-kit, you are limited (generally speaking) to the sounds that some creator out there in the world has provided to you.
For me as a drummer, I'd rather have the Pearl Export and dial it in to my tastes, my sounds, my style. Rather than take some off the shelf Alesis crap sounding kit that I cannot tweak - although in fairness, the Strata series I worked on does sound massively better, and has my sounds in it in the first place!!
So can a band sound good with a Strata series eDrum? Just out of curiosity, what vDrum model would you place the Strata at?
People are impressed by different things. Sometimes it is technique. Sometimes it is tone. Sometimes it is the combination. I don't think you can say most people are impressed only by the impact of the drums.
I once made a bet with my entire band that all I needed to get the entire bar clapping was a kick drum and lots of power out of my subwoofers.
I play guitar. No one in their right mind would ever put me on the throne, but to win the bet I walked up on stage by myself to start the 2nd set, killed the break music. Slid the fader up on the kick to a respectable "thump you in the chest" level, and put a simple 4 on the floor while I clapped above my head.
I don't think there was a single person in the club that wasn't clapping along and cheering so I announced the band and had them come up on stage as I called them. Pretty cool show for something that was supposed to be just a bet between band members
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You are right though, different people are impressed by different things..... but an awful lot of them are impressed by a good thump in the chest .... either from a good kick drum .... or a great palm mute.
This is the other thing - go see a band in a small venue. 200 capacity. Some of these venues have really good PA's. Some of them have shit PA's. A real drumkit in the shit PA venue has way more of a chance of connecting with the audience than the e-kit does. By sheer virtue of the fact that in those kinds of venues, you can hear and feel the drums in the room without the PA even being turned on.
... and this is also a great point. eDrums ONLY work with a very good PA.
I'll get banned if I tell you what I think about churches!!
Fair enough. My wife who is VERY religious would likely agree with you.
I bet drummers don’t fucking argue about guitar gear like this.
LMFAO. Likely not.
The reasons e-kits sound bad live IMO are almost by 100%:
- Bad "feeling" kits resulting in the drummer not being able to play as he/she would on a real kit. Part of that would also be:
- Inaccurate physical representations of the real deal. Mesh heads still can't deal with some techniques, cymbals feel vastly different and don't allow for the same technical performances, either.
- Choice of sampled kits. I have played a whole plethora of e-kit shows in the last decades - and even with the tech specs and options getting better and better, I have not even once heard a sampled kit that would sound like the real deal (and yes, I'm pretty much comparing apples to apples as in only refering to IEM gigs). Which is actually kinda astounding as I have a whole lot of sampled kits in plugin formats actually sounding better. But no, once an e-kit comes in, most drummers apparently feel forced to "improve" whatever it might be. So much that the loaded patches can't even sound like a natural kit anymore.
There's EQ and compression on pretty much anything, add the ocassional gate and obviously reverb. Also add to this that, once possible, at least some drummers seem to feel the need to switch kits inmidst gigs - which is fine for some sparsely used special samples, but just sucks for the entire kit (for the same reasons it's usually utter nonsense to use 974 amp models during a gig, even if it's a cover act).
Great points. The biggest issue I have had with eDrums is the drummers having the incessant need to change patches needlessly resulting in poorly mixed drums from one song to the next.
All the drummers I have worked with in my own band over the last .... 15 years have played exclusively eDrums in both practice and gigging, so they haven't had issues adjusting. Most of the drummers I know have an eKit at home or even one they use on gigs when the venue is sensitive to the higher volumes associated with the acoustic kit. I think it is getting pretty common for drummers to feel MORE at home on an eKit, but still, there are plenty of examples of drummers that are not.
