drum beat

[thejuice]

anyone find with modern music, if you have it on low volume all you can hear is the drum beat? Its really weird. Pretty sure im not completely deaf

 

[Judge]

I still chuckle at my car's 9-speaker audio system. Seems the frequency response is deliberately exaggerated to accentuate the lows. Forcing me to turn the bass way down well below the halfway point and still get plenty of 60 to 100hz punch. I'm just not much interested in letting the entire city know what I'm playing on my car's audio system. My bad.

 

[FilterFreq]

Drums have increasingly gotten louder in music over the course of the past few decades. At one point in time it used to just be the raw kit itself, then came electronic drums, drum triggers and beyond. Now we're at the point where bands just mix and match a lot of the above (and apply loads of compression to them) to create more (and far less in certain circumstances) dynamic performances.

I remember when layering triggers and acoustics were all the rage 20-ish years ago. I figured the trend would die out in heavier forms of music, but it has oddly only increased to the point where very few artists simply record raw. Some people don't even know how to play in time without loads of quantization and heavy editing, but that's a topic for other drum nerds like me

Also, drums are kind of like a whole collection of instruments, when you think about it, with a whole bunch of different timbral qualities affecting the entire frequency spectrum. It should kind of make sense for them to be, more or less, as dominant and large in the mix as they are!

 

[Au Naturel]

anyone find with modern music, if you have it on low volume all you can hear is the drum beat? Its really weird. Pretty sure im not completely deaf

It is also often all you can hear from the car next to you at the stop light as your window and chest vibrate to the beat.

 

[Neonatal RRT]

anyone find with modern music, if you have it on low volume all you can hear is the drum beat? Its really weird. Pretty sure im not completely deaf

Low frequency sound typically travels further and is more powerful in terms of its penetration. Elephants, for example, will communicate with each other over long distances by using low frequency sound that, as humans, we can't even hear. Crocodilians and whales do the same thing.

 

[thejuice]

Drums have increasingly gotten louder in music over the course of the past few decades. At one point in time it used to just be the raw kit itself, then came electronic drums, drum triggers and beyond. Now we're at the point where bands just mix and match a lot of the above (and apply loads of compression to them) to create more (and far less in certain circumstances) dynamic performances.

I remember when layering triggers and acoustics were all the rage 20-ish years ago. I figured the trend would die out in heavier forms of music, but it has oddly only increased to the point where very few artists simply record raw. Some people don't even know how to play in time without loads of quantization and heavy editing, but that's a topic for other drum nerds like me

Also, drums are kind of like a whole collection of instruments, when you think about it, with a whole bunch of different timbral qualities affecting the entire frequency spectrum. It should kind of make sense for them to be, more or less, as dominant and large in the mix as they are!

That's why metal all sounds the same these days. It's a production line mentality, possibly due to the bottom falling out of the economy of the music industry. The mastering is horrendous, it's a white noise. Singers sound like daleks, guitarists are clones, drummers are robots. It's a terrible era, I would say the worst ever!

Seeing a band live is a brutal experience of 'Expectation Vs Reality'. To the point where they've brought in autotune to the live experience, propping up these glorified mannequins. They also need backing tracks for training wheels. Remember when Ronnie Radke lost his laptops and cancelled a big show? A gig is now just theatre, except the show doesn't go on. Live quantising will be next.

I've recorded drums and played an out of time fill that the producers just clicked and dragged in to time on a computer screen lol. I got 20 takes at punching in a tough fill to get it perfect. Yes, samples were plastered over the top of my snare to bolster the sound. We didn't quantise and it wasn't compressed as far as I know, yuck! But then we didn't have commercial and marketing pressure, we did it for fun and funded it ourselves! The experience definitely lifted the veil on how the rockstars on radio and TV do it, they lost a lot of the mystique and it knocked them off their pedestal.

 

[thejuice]

I suspect the high frequencies at low volume being swallowed by drums might also be a loudness war issue (compression like you said).

Try listening to lo-fi music at low volume as an experiment, you might see what I mean.