Duplicating Grateful Dead snare....

[captain54]

Im in the process of doing a couple of gigs with a Grateful Dead cover band and I am attempting to come close to an authentic snare via e-drums...Im using a DM Pro but I would appreciate any v-drums users input...

Does anyone know what was the actual snare used to record the classics, "Truckin", "Friend of the Devil" and "Casey Jones", and "love Light"...?

I've come pretty close with the "Piccolo Pete" preset in the DM pro, and a lite rim snap for the rim trigger...

what do you think??

[halfnote]

The heads won't care what the snare sounds like so long as they can blow bubbles and noodle dance to it! Give em' LOTS of toms...they looove toms!

(I played in a GD cover band for a year but I played bass. The drummer played a bronze piccolo snare primarily though.)

-halfnote

[dr. kildrum]

Are you going to try to layer (w/random slight delay), sequence, etc. to sound like two drummers at times?

[This message has been edited by dr. kildrum (edited August 21, 2001).]

[captain54]

No, I wasnt planning on it Dr, but you've given me food for thought....

Have you made any attempts at this type of thing?? I'd like to hear the how's and why's of your process...

Some of those early Dead recordings at times sound like three drummers...talk about busy drumming...case in point "turn on your love light"....could the foreign substances ingested in those days contributed to those supercharged performances...

As you can tell, I'm more of a Charlie Watts type of guy...

[dr. kildrum]

To be honest, captain, I haven't really done too much of this at all. Just seems you could. I haven't covered Dead tunes very often in my career, but when I've seen the Dead live (o.k. that looks weird written down), I really dug the two drummer thing. I especially remember one concert in San Fran one New Year's..., great stuff.

It shouldn't be too hard to create some short underlying sequences that you could trigger from pads/pad rims, etc. and play over. Making sure that you are all playing at the correct tempo and triggering them on the downbeat is always the trick. If you have the gear, you could also layer to have similar or even very different drums trigger off the same pads, throw in a little random delay for a more human feel, and that would really thicken things up.

One of my favorite tricks of all time was/is to pick out a great two bar funky groove, and record it (sequencer). Now in the middle of a song, or back when they were in fashion, a drum solo, you could break into playing that groove, after a time or two through it, you trigger the loop of the same groove on the downbeat and play something intricate that plays off of it, over it. Sometimes for effect I even play the parts of the underlying loop (softly) or "ghost hit" where I can to give the illusion of playing both parts when it actually would be impossible or near it to pull off. (An oldie but a goodie.)

The illusion part only works with most of the audience (not drummers) and only if you sneak it in once or twice, and only if you do it well. I've seen a lot of attempts at this type of thing that sound/look awful too, but if done right it can be impressive. If doing this for more than a couple of measures here or there, I definitely would not expect to fool anybody and wouldn't even try, but rhythmically, it could be very interesting.

I wouldn't do any of it just to do it, but if you have a song or two where the original has a lot going on, it might be worth a try. Dead tunes just seem to me to lend themselves to extra percussion going on. If nothing else, it would be an interesting excercise, and with a little work and/or luck, you might end up with something that makes your bandmates go, "duh... wow man... how the?... cool."


[This message has been edited by dr. kildrum (edited August 22, 2001).]

[captain54]

Wow, some very cool ideas....

My original post was to try to pick the brains of e-drummers for authentic Dead snare recreations, and I've discovered another path to take this whole venture..

I remember the Doobie Brothers taking a cue from the Dead on the two drummer thing, and it really fattened it up...the odd thing about that was they both played the exact same thing...like having "stereo" drummers...