Metal Reviews

I know that they make drums sound clicky and involve computerizing them somehow, but what exactly are they?

A trigger is a special kind of contact microphone that is attached to the drum. It doesn't produce sound, but detects when the drum is struck and sends a MIDI note-on message. This MIDI signal controls a drum machine, triggering a corresponding sound from it.

So its like an electronic drum kit?

No, triggers don't produce a clicky sound, they can but you can get any type of sample whether it be boomy or clicky on a trigger, just depends on what sound you have loaded.

Basically they're just an attachment you put on your drum, or on Axis pedals they have a thing called an E-Kit which you put on the pedal, but most triggers are on the drum themselves and pick up the vibration from the head and take the sound from the module and send it.

Yes. Triggers don't produce sound on themselves. The sound depends solely on the sound you have loaded on the drum module you are triggering.

The question is, why do so many producers (notably in metal) choose such shitty sounds?

Pretty much. When you hit a drum with a trigger attached to it, you trigger a drum sound from an electronic sound module. Pretty much the same way an electronic drum kit works.

Yeah I dunno.

Into Eternity comes to mind when thinking of horrible drum kick drum sound.

Maybe metal producer choose that lame kick sound because it sounds hi-tech and brootal? I have no idea really, but it makes so many metal albums have crappy sounding kick

All of the albums that I really really love the drums in have that organic sound, and I assume that organic sound is the result of not using triggers.

Deathspell Omega doesn't use triggers, right? 'Cuz I really love the drums in that band.

I'd guess DSO doesn't use triggers. But who cares if they do as long as it sounds good, and it does sound good.


Also, on triggers. A lot of the time people will just record samples of their own acoustic drums and use those as the samples so the drum sound has that natural sound, but is a consistent sound for when playing at higher speeds.

I didn't even know such things existed...kind of weird to think that the sound you hear on the CD isn't really the sound the drums are making.

One of the main advantages is that when you're double bassing at a higher tempo, say, 240, your leg cannot move up and down that fast anymore, and you have to rely on footmotion alone. This results in very weak strokes (unless you're swiveling, but that's a different story) and with these triggers, you can still sound loud, because they don't rely on how hard you hit the drum.

There's also the problem that playing rapid double bass on one drum gives something of an unpredictable sound (basically, the drum is still vibrating from the first kick when the second one is played, messing up the sound). Most drummers opt for two bass drums to get around that issue, but thats takes up a lot of space and isn't cheap. Triggers let you dodge that problem.

Yeah, but I still think two pedals is quite useless. I don't see the musical improvement of getting over 180 in 16s.

Double bass just sounds cool, and as far as I'm concerned that's musical improvement. When I was first getting into metal, I thought double bass was one of the coolest things about metal music.

You can also just be very fucking fast with your right foot, same thing.

but it's pretty much impossible to play past 150...unless you're using heel toe.

Ofcourse heel toe. Well, toe toe toe etc actually, but your heel goes up and down all the time.

The point of having two pedals is you have two feet... why not use both of them? Whats the point of limiting yourself to only using one foot when you've got a whole other one to throw into the mix. No one complains about drummers using both of their hands.

Thats like saying a guitar player should just use downstrokes instead of alternating with upstrokes and downstrokes. I mean, it may be hypothetically possible to play tremelo riffs with downstrokes, but its just unnecessary when you can go up and down.