How The Drums Are Going To Work.

One of the things we’ve taken for granted in the past is that our drums are going to work live. I guess there’s a little bit of a gamble to it, but not much. You load the samples, midi everything up and, unless some jackass unplugs something between soundcheck and the actual set, things work out as planned.

Now, though, we’re considering making the move from sampler-based to software-based drums. The sampler-based drums allow for a certain amount of flexibility between songs, but the sounds themselves tend to lack dynamics. Our goal is to use Native Instruments Battery and a Mac laptop, however there’s that usual hesitation one feels when switching platforms. I’ve always found it strange that a sampler could consistently and reliably trigger several samples at the same time, but a computer - simply because of its lack of a dedicated processor, couldn’t do the same.

Anyway, today we tested out this setup and, despite a few initial hiccups, things went a little better than expected. The sounds are amazing. Battery 3 is a solid instrument, for sure, but stability of operation is going to be the deciding factor here. So far, so good, but we’ll need several more trials before committing to this new setup. Things that are relatively trivial in the studio (latency, CPU load, noise) are make-or-break in a live situation, so these things have to be completely eliminated before we move forward…

RYAN