Drum Channel Strip?

[Trojan Badger]

I've been listening recently to lots of older stuff from the 80s and before. Often it seems the best way to place something in its time is by listening to the drum sound - you've got the huge poodle rock sound, the unbelievably long reverb tail on a ballad, the squelched sausage-slapped-against-a-bucket snare sound of late 70s and Disco stuff, the come-back-and-slap-ya sound of Phil Collins and so on.

Reading through the forums I often see "Oh yeah, for such and such a sound put your compressor up to 10:1 on the kick" and so on...but...

Has any effects designer ever considered a drum channel strip with presets for individual drum types and styles? "Disco Kick", "Indie snare", "pop hat" - you know, that sort of thing? Complete with a reverb section with its own compressor and gate etc etc

This wouldn't just help the lazy like me who are looking for an old sound, this would act as an effective template to, say, apply across an album

Any thoughts?

[verstaerker]

i was always missing this in every host i tried - the song-presets - i was hoping that i only need to select the right preset (maybe change it a bit) and release it as the latest, coolest smash-hit and get famous

[Trojan Badger]

There's no substitute for talent, that's true, and frankly you can never polish a turd. But sometimes you just want to get "that sound" and your reverse-engineering skills aren't up to it...

Just as Amplitube has a whole stack of "artist presets" and "style presets" for guitar I'm wondering if anyone's done the same for an overall drum treatment.

[dharmawan]

well imho there are no dsp compressors or tape emulations anyway which get close to the stuff you mentioned. also the sounds depend very much on how the drums are tuned and miked. if u want and old sound and dont have the gear for it, your best bet is sampling

what hiphop is all about...

[dharmawan]

reverb is a bit closer, but how hard is it to set up a reverb on a snare?? not very hard mate. and a lot of reverbs have snare presets

[Trojan Badger]

reverb is a bit closer, but how hard is it to set up a reverb on a snare?? not very hard mate. and a lot of reverbs have snare presets

It's not just reverb, though, is it? It's Compression-->EQ-->(Reverb+Compression+Gate)-->maybe another gate->other stuff...

And that's not easy.

Listening to an 80s track the other day my bass player said "they basically had the same EQ setting for kick and snare, didn't they" and I could only dumbly nod my head.

Seriously, my question is why not for drums what they do for guitars, y'know?

[abi]

i think presets for drum would be less accurate than presets for guitars. i have the feeling that the frequency spectrums of two unprocessed guitars will ressemble each other more than those of two different snares. and dynamics is more important to the drum sound, too, and will have differnet effects on different snares. all in all i would say that the "variation of sound" is greater with drum sound than with guitars. this is just a guess.
besides, i think shaping drums does not take too much: one good eq, one good comp and one good reverb. and of course, time...

[Trojan Badger]

You'd think that was the case, until you look at what different guitarists use, and how different guitarists play. For example, you'd never dream of trying to get "That Stevie Ray Vaughan sound" using anything but a stratocaster on middle pickups. You'd never play a full open chord on a full-on mosh distortion setting. Blues requires a very different kind of raw guitar sound to punk to pop to ...you see? You have picking, widdling, strumming, muting, slow soloing, harmonics, and many other playing sounds, and that's before you get to pickup combinations, woods and pickup types...signature sounds always start at source whatever instrumnt you're playing.

Is this really such a hopeless suggestion?