Pantera – 5 Minutes Alone

The Superior Drummer 3 kit I put together was another good one. I struggled mighty hard finding the right snare sound, then I found it, and the I was like, “Why does it sound so wrong during the rest of the song?”  Well that’s because the snare at the VERY beginning of the song, is a different snare than what is actually played during the rest of the song. But once I found the correct snare sound (or close to what I think it is) for the song, I just left it at that. Everything else was fairly easy to replicate. Used the Death & Darkness SDX for 99% of the kit with a snare layer from the Made of Metal EZX. Hope you guys enjoy this one!

 

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Drum Cover

Ghost – Zenith

It’s been exactly 1 year since my last Ghost drum cover and I think I’ve finally curbed my addiction to Ghost covers.  This song was never on my radar for a cover but I was watching @ludvigkennberg YouTube channel (the original session drummer for this track), and he did a play through of this and I was like “Damn, this is a great drum track!” So I decided this one was going to make my list of covers to do. So here we are, the time is now!

This song starts off rather basic but features many different changes and that was the hardest for me. Trying to remember all the changes and what’s upcoming. But as I’ve told people in the comments, I learn songs by repetition, build up that muscle memory and eventually it all just starts to stick. That is, until the camera comes on for filming then you forget every fucking thing. 

The drum preset for Superior Drummer 3 is another great kit I put together using only the Death & Darkness SDX from@toontrack . I feel when I am able to remove the drums from songs using https://www.lalal.ai/, I have to work harder to closely match what is on the record. I think this one matches very well and will be available for purchase below.

 

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Drum Cover

Type O Negative – Christian Woman

This track is a personal one for me. It’s probably the song that really got me into Type O back in high school. I remember driving around with friends, listening to this CD, and air drumming the slow tom fill after that long interlude. We were amazed at how great the drums sounded on this album and here I am, some 31 years later, finally recreating it to near album quality. (At least I think it sounds close to album quality.) I put my heart and soul into this cover; I hope it shows.

I wanted this to be as perfect as can be. Unfortunately there are no drumless backing tracks for this song and most of those AI programs are horseshit. I really wanted the original drum track to be gone from this song and somehow, someway (maybe by some divine intervention from Peter), I stumbled upon lalal.ai. This is probably one of the first AI programs I found that did a halfway decent pass at removing the drum track.

As for the drum kit preset. Holy shit is this a work of art. I thought I did good with the Black Album kit but I think this one is even closer to the original than the Metallica one. Even when I watch back my footage and that first snare flam hit to kick off the song, you’d swear it still was the original drum track playing. There was a lot of work done on this preset. Some automation techniques for removing reverb at certain points and it all came together thanks to my good Youtuber pal @MikeConwayDrums sending me over a killer cowbell sample (from Van Halen of course) that I used after the solo 7:14. I ended up using The Metal Foundry SDX, Fields of Rock SDX, and Drums of Destruction EZX to capture this iconic drum sound. Hope you all dig it! 

 

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Drum Cover

Tesla – Modern Day Cowboy

I reused the kit I put together for the Bon Jovi cover because that track was just as powerful as this. I altered the reverb and compression, but aside from that, the kit is about the same. One thing I was missing was a gong! None of my Toontrack libraries had one, so I grabbed the biggest, fattest sounding ride I had (from the Fields of Rock SDX), tuned it way down, and tweaked the hold/delay. It came out fucking great!

As for my playing…well, Troy has great technique with his rhythm hand that I simply cannot do. I went to the alternating hits for the verses on the hi-hat and straightened out the Chorus pattern because I just cannot play it the way Troy does originally. Small details but if you watch the original video of this track, you can see what I mean.

 

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Drum Cover