Starship321 wrote:maximee wrote:I have a little two piece metal project called
Highspeed Nosebleed and we are playing without a drummer.
All the drums are arranged using superior drummer and ableton - and that's also how we perform live.
It sure is different than playing with a real drummer, but not necessarily worse!
We can go as fast as we want, we can tour only by train, and we don't have to haul around big drum sets. That's pretty cool. The only downside is that we're always dependent on a decent PA system in venues. But all in all the drum computer and the fact that we don't look really metal at all really opens up a different audience than your average metal gig.
Also, songwriting is radically different than rehearsing the same part over and over in the band room.
Nowadays, I do it all on the computer for this band and it is MUCH quicker.
So I could just use my mac and go down that route?
What sort of equipment would I need?
I know nothing about drum machines or metal but I dig that thing on someone's head in the photo haha
That's pretty much what we do- the only reason we use an iPod over a laptop is that it would be much easier to replace an iPod is something happened to it.
You would need a computer, obviously, and then some sort of sequencing software. Garageband would probably work fine, it's $6 (use to be free- so a used computer might come with it) and has a few drum machines, some meant to sound real some meant to sound like drum machines. From there, you could run straight from the headphone jack into the PA system or an amp, or through an external soundcard into the PA system or an amp.
Sequencing isn't hard at all once you get the hang of it. I don't have much experience outside of garageband and logic, but with those you have a grid where the X axis is keys on a piano (pitch for a melodic instrument, various samples- like a kick or snare- for a percussion instrument) and the Y axis is time in beats and measures. You place markers on the grid to indicate what will trigger and when and then the software reads the markers and interoperates them based on the instrument. Hope I explained that okay, youtube might do a better job
One other benefit to using software over a drum machine is that you can incorporate other sounds, like droning synths or sound-collage-y stuff, which is also something we do- it also means that if you every want to record, you'll already have most of the equipment to do so, and will only need some way of getting guitar tracks into the computer.