New Record: Real Live Drum Sounds

[fcollazo]

Aren't you guys happy that this new record will have Louie laying down real drum tracks by himself with no computers in the way! I am excited. I will not sound dated!

[Jonathan]

As a percussionist, it would be nice. Can't wait to hear it anyway. I don't mind a little programming though.

[Dan]

Yes will be good to hear real drums for a change, Louie's drums on PDC were killer so this should be good.

[brent]

The thing about Louie's PDC tracks is this:

When we ran out of hard drive space (2TBs, which is a bunch). I set up an Alesis Masterlink (a two=track, hard disk, "master" recorder. I submixed Louie's drums within ProTools HD, and sent that via AES/EBU (digital) to the Masterlink. This meant that Louie's drum mix was fixed. I would not be able to change levels later, unless I overlayed samples of him or someone else over his tracks. IT was a bit hard to hear what I was doing, because I was sitting right in front of the drums with Alan and a friend of mine, Chris Cleveland (Stars Go Dim). We got something usable most of the time. Some EQ and compression was added in mixing. We used no samples from Slate Drums, Drumagog, etc, which is the de facto standard thing to do. We let the real drums shine, even though they might not be perfect.

[Dan]

Killer means good. I love the Drum work on PDC

[brent]

Killer means good. I love the Drum work on PDC

I know what you meant. The explanation is for those musos among us.

[fcollazo]

Hey Brent, I heard the New PDC project and it sounds incredible and super-updated, both in production and Music Style. Who Played drums and Guitar? Sounds killer. Is it for sale already?

[brent]

Thanks for the comments. "Mechanism" was released on July 10th via www.indieheaven.com/artists/projectdamagecontrol and will be released on double CD soon. We should be available on all legal download sites any day now.

Louie is the primary drummer. Marco Sfogli http://www.marcosfogli.com/ and Alan Sandifer played guitars.

[fcollazo]

Great, we'll get it!

[Mountain Man]

Not surprising that the new albums will feature Louie exclusively. That was always a sore point with him during his time with Petra, and I can't imagine he would have come back if it was going to be any other way.

[trodLAN]

I bought a downloadable zip of the new PDC album. I like it a lot!
The best songs (in my opinion) are "Hell no..., Get away, Lost Again (of course ), and Trust!

[Jan]

Mechanism is GREAT! I thought I was going to like Fly the best, but now that I've listened to them a few times, I like Light Me Up the best. Cool bass and drums, good singing, good lyrics.......it's all good.

[brent]

Thanks for the compliments ya'll (that's Oklahoma country speak for everybody).

[curt]

Not surprising that the new albums will feature Louie exclusively. That was always a sore point with him during his time with Petra, and I can't imagine he would have come back if it was going to be any other way.

Mountain Man

I was rather surprised when I heard he didn't play real drums on the records. At times I remember being a bit suspicious about Petra's sound. As a teenager I was impressed by the sound on a record like Unseen Power, but I also play guitar myself, and I always thought the records had a sound of something that couldn't be done live by real musicians.

I don't know if he would have returned or not had they choosen to do fake drums again but I think it's very nice that he's going to play real drums.

[CatNamedManny]

I don't know if he would have returned or not had they choosen to do fake drums again but I think it's very nice that he's going to play real drums.

Just for the record, the only album on which Petra did "fake" drums was Beat the System, and that actually makes some sense, given the electronic nature of the album*. Louie did drums on his first album with the band, More Power to Ya, then studio drummer Keith Edwards (who had filled in between drummers on Never Say Die) did drums for Not of This World at Jonathan David Brown's request. It seems like someone may have said once that the drums on No Doubt were also mostly electronic, but I may have misremembered that; there was certainly something screwy going on with them, though.

*(I don't mean to imply that doing electronic drums on Beat the System was a wise or necessary move, or that the motivation was different because of the album's style, because that's all incidental to JDB's decision to cut Louie out of studio drumming. They didn't work well together, and JDB decided the best way to handle that was not to have the band's full-time drummer actually play the drums on the band's albums, which strikes me as pretty terrible management of the situation, but I wasn't there, and that's all pretty much ancient history at this point. I'm just saying that since the album was so electronic in style, not having a live drummer on the album wasn't as bad if it had been one of the previous records.)