Ordinarily I would agree with you on the drums. But! Here's what I'm thinking: I think the brothers were fanatics when it came to drum triggers. So much of the stuff from the early days could have been done with midi triggers and I believe they could have accomplished a lot of the things that we hear in the more advanced work as well with certain trigger methods, for lack of a better phrase.rjohnny wrote:This tape is not BoC, imo.
I think that this tape, when compared with the past dubious tunes that surfaced on youtube/vocaroo/etc, is more refined.
BUT, the proof that I search for when listening to unknown tunes is..the drums.
BoC have a particular way to work on drum tracks: they layer different tracks, some are live drums played by Mike, some are drum loops (some are probably sampled with the S1000 and then downsampled to lower bitrate), they pan different tracks L and R, put some percussions here and there, etc. The thing is, drums sound so full in their tracks. This is not a simple task, this must take a looot of time to get a perfect sound like that.
All these unknown tapes just use a single drum track at the center or at most two, one panned left and one panned right.
In my opinion their synth sounds are easier to get, you can use hardware synths or work with VSTs, use tape to add grit, make layers, sure a lot of work is needed here too, but the drums..well, this is something completely different.
Just my two cents
They could have accomplished some truly unique sampling techniques utilizing triggers as well. Or, should I simply say they could have triggered their samples? I know there has been mention of them using triggered samples in live shows, and I believe that's been confirmed by someone.
What I hear in the VHS tape sounds a lot like they had some sort of a drum trigger setup. I don't know why the hell I can't think of the right terminology right now. But hopefully you get what I'm trying to say.
I agree that the drums were very simple if not elementary on the VHS tape, but it still worked. There were also several moments of what I would consider to be chaotic drumming, that reminded me of some earlier Warp stuff from other artists and this all led me to start thinking about that updated soundtrack for the animated movie Fantastic Planet, which I created a thread about recently.
they definitely used midi triggering, for a live situation is almost mandatory, for example in the live version of Telephasic Workshop (probably my favourite live performance of theirs) drums are definitely made by midi triggered samples.
