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!
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!
Leave it to me to do a drum cover of probably one of the least favorite Avenged Sevenfold songs they have; or at least their most obscure song from an album with mixed reviews on their style shift. I dunno, I always enjoyed the “Hail to the King” album. I love the solid, straight-forward style drumming Arin did on the record because these are the tracks I like to cover; nothing overly flashy but still ROCK HARD!
You know how when you practice a song for a bit and you think you got everything worked out, then you go to film, and once that camera turns on, everything goes to shit? That happens to me all the time and this one was no fucking exception. It’s not a hard song but I made one mistake early in the filming and then that fucked me in the head for the next 4-5 takes. I finally got a good take and added some outtakes at the end for your enjoyment.
Nothing too crazy with the kit, just using the Death SDX again (two covers in a row!).
Mick Mars, yes the former lead guitarist and co-founder of Motley Crue, is coming out with his debut solo album next month (February 23, 2024); which this track was one of the first singles released. When I heard it, I immediately fell in love with it and knew that this was going to be a drum cover from me, eventually… I didn’t think I would get it out this quickly, but hey, that’s a great problem to have. I pushed my scheduled January drum cover back to February because I wanted to be the FIRST person to release this drum cover on YouTube. (at least at the point of scheduling this on January 13th)
I researched who is playing with Mick on this album and to my surprise, Ray Luzier (drummer from Korn) tracked all the drums! I love Ray and his style. He is definitely one of my most favorite drummers right now and I am glad to say I finally have a drum cover by Ray under my belt. ????Although not a very difficult or technical song, it does have a solid groove straight through and the drum fill at 1:32 and coming out of the solo at 2:22 is so fucking tasteful!
As for the kit sounds, I built a new preset using the Death SDX in Superior Drummer 3 that I think might make it’s way into to future songs as well. Hope you guys enjoy the track!
Another fun tune with a great drumless backing track from the Drumless YouTube channel. I was challenged to not play this song perfectly or a 1:1 match with the original. So that’s what I did for the 2nd half of the song. It was fun and easier than I thought because I can do the drum fills however I wanted instead of learning someone elses. 🙂 I built a great sounding kit with The Rooms of Hansa SDX that I’ve had for a while but I never even really used this library on anything. But this song fit perfectly for it!
