Smarter Drums

A friend turned me on to the 33-1/3 series of books about classic rock albums; I'd heard about them in general but hadn't had time to check them out until he gave them high marks. I can't locate a copy of the one I most want yet (the one on 69 Love Songs) but I picked up the ones on Unknown Pleasures and Doolittle, which are both good reads.

The Joy Division one, in particular, is helping me think through some production issues with my own music, particularly with drums.

I've known for a long time that drums get multitracked in interesting ways in professional studio recordings. The thing is, programming drum tracks can be kind of hard, especially if you're a non-drummer and/or programming neophyte, as I am. Old-school drum machines like my Roland DR-570 (I think that's the one I have) have clunky interfaces by modern standards, and if you aren't skilled enough to lay down beats live-ish, then you're stuck quantizing them in beat by beat, instrument by instrument. Tedious!

As good as you can make the results, they're better suited to live performance than to studio tracking. Unless you want your drums all on one track.

Modern platforms like my Roland Xa have a bewildering plethora of percussion samples ... maybe too much. The programming interfaces are better. But it still helps if you know what you're doing, and if you don't have to lean too heavily on quantizing. My live playing has gotten better, but I'm still not great. I've picked up a little knowledge here and there but I'm not a great beat programmer.

It's still easiest to do it all one one track, too.

If you move over to a laptop/desktop, as simple a tool as GarageBand will get you up and running with nice MIDI drum loops, or with longer (non-re-programmable) rhythm samples. Because they're loops and because the programming interface is loop-oriented, you can lay out long drum tracks much more easily. Copy/paste, or drag a loop to repeat, and you're in business.

It's still tempting to do it all on one or two tracks, pan them a little, and rush off to all the other instruments you're dying to record, though. You know: the instruments you understand better and can play more accurately. ;-)

Even so, GarageBand has proven to be a great tool for figuring out what to program on my Roland, for live performances. For my recent live show, all of the best beats were just matters of my taking GB tracks (mostly MIDI loops, but some of the sample loops as well) and reprogramming them, quantum by quantum, with similar-sounding Roland samples. Some of them came out really great.

Still, I've known for a long time that sooner or later, if I wanted my recordings to sound better, I was going to have to tackle rhythm programming and recording more systematically.

The Unknown Pleasures book talks a bit about Martin Hannett's various studio manipulations of Joy Division's sound. Among other things, there's talk about his use of digital delay (then a newish tech) and of his running Stephen Morris's drums through mikes that fed a single amplifier far away in a bathroom and thence into another mike, to get a particular quality to the sound.

Without going that far, it just confirms some of the stuff I've been hacking with lately, if not in the details, then at least in the concept: play around with it, take risks, listen to the results, hear what you get.

It's dead easy to pull a drum loop around in GarageBand and let it run, but after a while it sounds repetitive in a bad (rather than good) way. What to do? A couple of weeks ago, I multitracked a loop I liked, copying it into the same measures on four or five tracks. Then I deleted all but one instrument from each track. Then I panned and set levels on the tracks individually.

Just as one suspects they do in real studios when they have enough tracks.

It made an immediate difference to the track by opening up the aural field left to right. It seems as though things like the hi hats or shakers and such, are particularly good to pan harder left or right, they open up a good deal of space.

So I've been spending some time taking some of my favorite GB loops (or even ones I don't much care about) and dis-articulating them into pieces, instrument by instrument. Next I'm mixing and matching them, seeing what pieces that didn't originally go together might nevertheless work nicely together.

I'm also assigning them to different sets of samples than they usually start with, just to hear the difference it makes. Some things that sound like really boring 1980s rhythm tracks (and hey, I love the 80s, I always go for those ... but they can sound a little dull) sound much fresher with hip-hop or techno-style instruments.