Drum Tracks

MrCookieMonster

Im in a band who abosolutely cannot find a drummer, and I was wondering about other bands who have this problem. My brother is a sound engineer and he is dying for us to turn to drum tracks. Finding a drummer seems to be an extremely common problem. Has anybody tried drum tracks?

PMI

Well even when you record with a great drummer 10 chances to one your gonna flex it all into perfect time and replace some sounds with samples.

ALL THE BIG BOYS DO....

Drum tracks using the likes of superior drummer etc.. will be amazing sounding if programmed correctly.

I do alot of programming of drums for people and you have to be able to realise mainly that a drummer doesnt hit every hi hat/ kick/ snare exactly in same place on the drum or same velocity although it can be close the tone of the drum changes etc.. which gives that human vibe that drummers love to bang on about

If you can capture that and get alot of the drum room ambience into it, you will never look back speed wise

Drummers are everywhere but good ones are all taken

Music-and-booze

Took my band absolutely ages to find a drummer, puttin ads everywhere like here gumtree musolist etc. After about 5 or 6 months we've found a new one, who happens to be from denmark (oh the irony:D). But there is a huge shortage of skin bashers around Dublin at the moment and it'll take a helluva a lot of patience on ur part, id say just keep tryin and if u persevere for long enough and put in the effort you'll find someone.
as for drum tracks, well we just never had the money for that kinda thing, especially playing live, id say pulling that off would require some expensive kit ie, laptop, DAW etc...

MrCookieMonster

Well we have been together over a year and still havent found a drummer:eek: We arent going to give up looking or anything, but drum tracks seems to be the way to go at least temporarily.
Indeed all the good ones are taken, we had a couple of really ****e drummers before.
My brother did drum tracks for us once for a recording which sounded very well (better than we did on the recording to be honest) and he'll do it for free. So it might work out, you never know!! It'll take a bit of getting used to though I imagine

seifer.

we have the same problem, kinda gave up looking for a while though, always hard to find drummer's and the few we did find weren't much use!
here's a kinda useful thing we did as both myself and the other guitarist in the band can play drums to a somewhat decent standard.

needed : a computer, audio interface, small pa system.

booked a rehearsal room and rented the snare and cymbals.

recorded a load of drum grooves.....different tempo's and variations in garageband(we used a mac, so unless you've got a mac it'll be some other software).
saved the file and then set up entire drum tracks by cutting and pasting the different grooves into the order we needed them in for certain songs and saving them into new files for that particular song(all the stuff we played were origionals btw)
we had maybe a full hour of drum recordings done, this hour went a long way.
it was handy cos it was much easier to use than some drum machines i've played around with and easier to customize.

i had a 200 watt 8 channel pa system lying about, i think it was about 500 quid but a smaller cheaper one will do aswell. after setting up the drum tracks in garageband just just ran the output of the laptop into the pa.
i know you could just run it into a pa you are running everything else through but we used to position the pa where the drummer would be to get a more real live drummer effect. you could even do this live and mic the speakers.

the pa system had 4 speaker outs so we multi tracked the drums and used the eq in garageband to just get snare out of 1 then bass out of another etc. etc. you won't be able to eq all the other sounds out but since they are all the same tracks anyway it doesn't matter.

i know its not the same as an actual drummer but great system to tide ye over til ye do. might start another thread somewhere on this, it really is the next best thing and since alot of bands have this problem might be of some use to ppl.
good luck finding a drummer

MilanPan!c

MrCookieMonster wrote: »

Well we have been together over a year and still havent found a drummer:eek: We arent going to give up looking or anything, but drum tracks seems to be the way to go at least temporarily.
Indeed all the good ones are taken, we had a couple of really ****e drummers before.
My brother did drum tracks for us once for a recording which sounded very well (better than we did on the recording to be honest) and he'll do it for free. So it might work out, you never know!! It'll take a bit of getting used to though I imagine

If you want to push forward, use drum tracks... If they'll help you sound better then you're more likely to land a hot **** drummer.

But!

Watch yer bro do it and learn!

Don't let someone else dictate when you can work on a new song, etc.

Plus, it's fun enough.

And for the record, those new Abbey Road kits are unbelievable.

Not to pimp, but I did this and have had a few pro-musicanians and producers ask who played them!:

http://soundcloud.com/the-riot-tapes/live-mix-02

Also, if you're gonna record, scrape together the dough and hire a pro for a few days... You won't regret it!

kevin.mullally

Drum tracks are fine for practise or for making songs but I was a ta gig where a band used drum tracks before and it wasnt that cool. It sounded good yeah but it looked pretty silly imo seeing just a guitarist a bassist and a singer up on the stage.

El Gringo

MrCookieMonster wrote: »

Im in a band who abosolutely cannot find a drummer, and I was wondering about other bands who have this problem. My brother is a sound engineer and he is dying for us to turn to drum tracks. Finding a drummer seems to be an extremely common problem. Has anybody tried drum tracks?

What sorta music do you guys play?
Im a drummer in dublin looking to join a band.
I heard finding a drummer is the hard part alright.
I've been playing for years but never in a band
PM me if ur interested in a jam sometime