New Zealand Heavy Metal Forum & Discussion

[Obzen]

Do you use triggers? Is it cheating?

I'm talking about just Bass drum triggers. Snare and tom triggers is a whole nother debate/debarkle.

[Trendkill]

I reckon theyre all good, long as the trigger sounds nice

From what I've heard, using triggers doesnt really help you cheat,
More exposes your weakness or lack of technique

They help keep the bass drum up in the mix or something too?

[Dead Kid]

Nearly all of the bands/genres I listen to should be able to do just fine without triggers, but if they prefer using them I don't care as long as the music still sounds good.

[blastman]

1st: I don't play with triggers (for now) but I plan on acquiring Axis Ekits and the Alesis DM10 at somepoint.

As far as the "cheating" debate on triggers: Depends on how full on a "music police" you wanna be. Vocalists, guitarists, bassiest, and keyboardists get to use millions of effects to "improve" their sound and nobody cares BUT a drummer using triggers and all of a sudden their musical ability gets questioned? (Seems pretty unfair and unnessacary).

As long as there's "clarity" and "definition" in the kick-drum sound then I seriously don't care if it's triggered or natural.

Besides I'm not sure it's acoustically possible to have both those attributes when playing with mic'd natural-sounding bass drums when the tempos start going pass, say, 230bpm? Everything just starts sounding like humming noises.

I personally don't know of ANY drummer that uses triggers to "add extra beats" to their double bass playing. It actually makes mistakes more audible if the drummer's double bass skills are inadequate.

Only thing I'm likely to be suspecious about people using triggers is the "sensitivity" component on the drum module(meaning you could actually play tap-strokes all night and sound like you're playing full-motion strokes).

My 2 cents on the issue.

[bloodnutt]

my older brothers drummer was using triggers on his nice as fuck set up and this was a fuking abba tribute band ten plus years ago, so no way is it cheating, it just helps penetrate the mix, plus is time saving in getting a chur sound, u can mix it with the mike sound as well. again all depends on the drum sample

[Burning Beard]

Yeah quality of samples is key.

There's nothing worse than something that sounds like cheap midi.
This is fucking AWFUL - Pete Sandoval on a recent Terrorizer track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBPgVxAEQ40