singemonkey wrote:
I agree with Bob. You may need to put subtle pressure on your drummer to make sure he's practising with a metronome. All the energy of a band comes from the drummer. You can't afford for the drummer to be any kind of weak link. A great band with a kak drummer will sound kak while a mediocre band with a great drummer with sound pretty good.
This!
My drummer is a tank and still my entire band never stops bitching at him to practice more, the tighter he becomes the more solid our foundation is which can really help let the instrumentation "breathe" better and in turn allows us to be tighter cause the structure can be followed better. We make him practice with a metronome and at band practice we make him play to a click track , we will also be making him play to a click live as this way all the delays and modulation effects used on the other instruments can be tempo synched to allow for a tighter performance ?
I highly recommend you force your bassist to actually practice with your drummer, our bassist often spends time at our drummers house running through the trickier and more syncopated parts. I also recommend that for the more difficult parts you actually find a way to pull them out and isolate them from the track and really focus on them, this can and will make a huge difference, it simply isn't enough to practice the whole song and hope when the difficult parts come up you don't fudge it up and this is a great way to achieve that extra tightness. You possibly would only need a metronome for this, in our band there are tons of tempo and time signature changes and we have a synth layer backing track in some parts so we tend to have to isolate things in our DAW and then change the tempo and work up from there. If you're good at tabulating I'd recommend using Guitar Pro and it's speed trainer (F9) for this, but then you need to be able to transcribe all of the parts correctly.
One thing we do which I believe can have a positive effect musically is that we sit down behind a PC and write everything as a band. Each song is a complete scratch take with a correct tempo track and backing layer and finalised concept before we go into rehearsing it, this can help in pushing yourself further by setting your aims high and then working to be able to deliver on them and it can also be a great way to let your creativity roam free and then worry about the consequences of how to play it afterwards ? I highly recommend doing this so that each member of your band can go home and spend time listening to each track, REALLY LISTEN to each track, then when you come together again everyone should be able to give feedback on what they felt were weaknesses etc.
We literally scrutinize everything from the guitar parts to the way in which a synth sound may attack and we pay a large amount of attention to the drums and how they emphasize and move with things musically. Everything is prewritten so when we get to practice not one drum fill is improvised, not one hit is allowed to fall out of place. If we do decide to add in a section for improvisation it's pre-determined and the bars and underlying progression are worked out in advance. This may seem a bit over the top but we find that it makes the performance more consistent and also guarantees that the music always carries the correct feel we were trying to convey.
You're in a metal band and unless a metal band is inhumanly tight they generally just sound average, which in real music terms is crap ? I hold up Meshuggah as one of the ultimate examples of tightness in metal, check them out:
Thomas Haake is a god! ?
Sorry if that was a bit of a rant, just trying to share some advice with you that you may or may not find helpful. These are just the methods we use, they may not work for everyone, but being a well rehearsed tight band is pretty much a must in metal so get your drummer a metronome and tell him to stop being lazy ?
