Live hi hat tricks

youknowmysteeze22 wrote:Im using an MPC 3000 and trying to chop these breaks. That digital silence is killing me trying to get these drum breaks to sound smooth. lol

ArKyve-31 wrote:

youknowmysteeze22 wrote:Im using an MPC 3000 and trying to chop these breaks. That digital silence is killing me trying to get these drum breaks to sound smooth. lol

It also helps to remember that the breaks need to be played closer to the original tempo. What I mean is if the break is originally at 98 bpm and you're playing it to a beat of 80, of course there is going to be digital silence, to avoid that I usually detune up or down to fit the tempo or just layer in more drums in the the background to offset the silence.

youknowmysteeze22 wrote:Good call. I gotta watch that tempo. Do you guys always beef up your break drums with other drums over them?

As the early Devo shaped their sound over years of rehearsal in a disused Akron carwash, Mark Mothersbaugh and the other members took every opportunity to expand the palette of sounds available to them. The few pre-built synths on the market were colossally expensive, so this uncontrollable urge to experiment was channelled into building their own gear and modifying anything they could get their hands on.

“My brother Jim was the first drummer for Devo, and early on, I was trying to encourage him to come up with something electronic-sounding on drums. And he invented one of the first electronic drum kits, in like ’72-’73. On his very first electronic drum kit that he built, he took acoustic drums and took guitar pickups, glued them on to the heads, and ran that through a wah-wah pedal and a fuzz pedal and an echo box, and put that into an amp on stage. So he’d sit there, and he’d have one foot on his kick, and the hi-hat would be totally closed but it would be going into a wah pedal. He was using the filter on the mic going into the wah-wah pedal to make an open and closed hi-hat, and he could get all this articulation on it. It was really crude and it was really scary-sounding. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything since that was quite like what his drum kit sounded back in those days. And it was a little bit out of control. Sometimes, by going into this Echoplex and trying to work it while he was playing with the band, it would start regenerating to the point where he couldn’t stop it on stage, and he’d have to stop playing so he could turn off the Echoplex.