re-watching i can see where that's not very impressive looking, but if you kn ow the original song and what he's trying to imitate, it's nearly impossible
That he is and doesn't get a lot of credit like these other drummers. Didn't know you were a fan of DEP. He made Coheed & Cambria 100% better when he was with them. Then he left )
I'm sure they're gonna do the same lame joke with him as they did with Kirk for the guitarists one
Over a third of the bands represented on last year’s list of of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists also showed up on this Top 25 Modern Metal Drummers list. Only one musician appeared on both lists, though, and that is Scott Hull. Nobody with functioning ear canals would argue with Hull’s riff-writing for Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Shit, his guitarwork is so intensely rhythmic that it could have qualified for our Best Drummers list by itself. But I’m going to throw down the gauntlet and say that Hull’s drum programming in Agoraphobic Nosebleed is as creative as anything done by the other “proper” drummers on this list, and probably more important.
First, some background. The drums on ANb’s earliest splits and 7-inches are clearly fake. Even so, Hull’s programming on tracks like “Dc5” and “Panic Gasp” (both available on the 136-track Bestial Machinery compilation) are densely packed with a degree of rhythmic variety that you’d hope an actual drummer would bring to this kind of music. As Hull tells us via e-mail from his Visceral Sound studio in Bethesda, Maryland, “We never really wanted to be known as a ‘drum machine’ band. We started out using a drum machine just because 1) it was easier 2) we didn’t have a drummer and 3) we didn’t want to spend endless time rehearsing songs again and again. We just wanted to create a song, commit it to ‘tape,’ then move on, never playing that song again.”
After ANb’s 2002 epic Frozen Corpse Stuffed with Dope, Hull ditched the drum machine and started MIDI sequencing in Cubase, using Toontrack’s multi-sampled drum packs. While the ludicrous speeds of “Living Lolita Blowjob” or “Children Blown to Bits by the Busload” from the 100-song mini CD Altered States of America were definitely not reproducible by human limbs, you could hear an increasing realism in the sound of Hull’s ride cymbals and tom drums. Fast forward a few years to ANb’s atypically slow, shifty Domestic Powerviolence split with Apartment 213, and Hull’s programming has become virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
“I’m kind of a stickler for realistic sounding drums; snares, toms, etc.,” Hull explains. “These new drum sets have 127 velocity layers, and across each layer you have many, many redundant sampled hits so that, at a given velocity layer, you don’t get the same hit twice…really, all I have to do is listen to what real drummers do, and translate that into articulations and patterns in the MIDI sequencer. It’s just about caring enough to spend the time required to put in the detail. It does take a lot of time!”
There’s nothing romantic about the notion of Scott Hull sitting in his office chair at four AM, chugging 5-Hour Energy shots as he manually sequences every single note of an Agoraphobic Nosebleed drum track. But if you don’t consider this man some kind of a mad genius after you hear his infamous programmed drum solo at the 1:41 mark on Agorapocalypse’s “Question of Integrity,” you just aren’t listening properly.
That solo would count as perfectly good grandstanding if Vinnie Colaiuta were playing it. The fact that Hull meticulously crafted forty-five seconds of what sounds like spontaneity is more than “perfectly good” – it’s a total mindfuck. In fact, it calls into question a lot of what we hold most dear about music. What is a great musician but a deeply curious musical spirit who has the technique to manifest whatever he hears inside his head? And isn’t Scott Hull precisely that, even though he didn’t touch a single snare, cymbal or kick drum in the creation of Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s entire oeuvre?
Of course, there are plenty of terrific drum programmers in metal. Hull points to Joe Preston of Thrones, Shaun LaCanne’s one-man-and-an-iPod death metal band Putrid Pile, and O.G. drum machine grind band Wadge as inspirations. Genghis Tron have done some awfully creative stuff without a real drummer, and then there’s Meshuggah, who tracked drums on Catch Thirtythree and the rejiggered version of Nothing with the same Drumkit from Hell software used on Agorapocalypse. For verisimilitude, variety and straight audacity, though, nobody beats Hull at the drum programming game.
And don’t take my word for it! Pig Destroyer’s new drummer Adam Jarvis tells us, “When I first heard the new Pig Destroyer tracks ,I was mostly impressed by the flow and precision of Scott’s drum programming. I thought I was going to have to reprogram certain things, but after hearing what he laid down it’s pretty much the final product.” Jarvis also claims that Hull has a violent, alcoholic pet octopus in his control room that programs all of Scott’s drums for him, so we got a second opinion from our #11 honoree Dave Witte, who practiced with Pig Destroyer for a while. Witte says, “Scott Hull can program realistic sounding drums and drum patterns better than anyone I know or have heard, especially in the metal world. No one can touch him. His challenging ideas are of the utmost in quality and meticulous attention to detail. I’ve seen him doing it, each hit by hit, dynamics, hesitations, everything. He makes you believe it’s a real drum… He claims he has me in mind when he maps things out. I tell him he’s crazy.”
Comments
I was kidding bout the Lars thing
First, some background. The drums on ANb’s earliest splits and 7-inches are clearly fake. Even so, Hull’s programming on tracks like “Dc5” and “Panic Gasp” (both available on the 136-track Bestial Machinery compilation) are densely packed with a degree of rhythmic variety that you’d hope an actual drummer would bring to this kind of music. As Hull tells us via e-mail from his Visceral Sound studio in Bethesda, Maryland, “We never really wanted to be known as a ‘drum machine’ band. We started out using a drum machine just because 1) it was easier 2) we didn’t have a drummer and 3) we didn’t want to spend endless time rehearsing songs again and again. We just wanted to create a song, commit it to ‘tape,’ then move on, never playing that song again.”
After ANb’s 2002 epic Frozen Corpse Stuffed with Dope, Hull ditched the drum machine and started MIDI sequencing in Cubase, using Toontrack’s multi-sampled drum packs. While the ludicrous speeds of “Living Lolita Blowjob” or “Children Blown to Bits by the Busload” from the 100-song mini CD Altered States of America were definitely not reproducible by human limbs, you could hear an increasing realism in the sound of Hull’s ride cymbals and tom drums. Fast forward a few years to ANb’s atypically slow, shifty Domestic Powerviolence split with Apartment 213, and Hull’s programming has become virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.
“I’m kind of a stickler for realistic sounding drums; snares, toms, etc.,” Hull explains. “These new drum sets have 127 velocity layers, and across each layer you have many, many redundant sampled hits so that, at a given velocity layer, you don’t get the same hit twice…really, all I have to do is listen to what real drummers do, and translate that into articulations and patterns in the MIDI sequencer. It’s just about caring enough to spend the time required to put in the detail. It does take a lot of time!”
There’s nothing romantic about the notion of Scott Hull sitting in his office chair at four AM, chugging 5-Hour Energy shots as he manually sequences every single note of an Agoraphobic Nosebleed drum track. But if you don’t consider this man some kind of a mad genius after you hear his infamous programmed drum solo at the 1:41 mark on Agorapocalypse’s “Question of Integrity,” you just aren’t listening properly.
That solo would count as perfectly good grandstanding if Vinnie Colaiuta were playing it. The fact that Hull meticulously crafted forty-five seconds of what sounds like spontaneity is more than “perfectly good” – it’s a total mindfuck. In fact, it calls into question a lot of what we hold most dear about music. What is a great musician but a deeply curious musical spirit who has the technique to manifest whatever he hears inside his head? And isn’t Scott Hull precisely that, even though he didn’t touch a single snare, cymbal or kick drum in the creation of Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s entire oeuvre?
Of course, there are plenty of terrific drum programmers in metal. Hull points to Joe Preston of Thrones, Shaun LaCanne’s one-man-and-an-iPod death metal band Putrid Pile, and O.G. drum machine grind band Wadge as inspirations. Genghis Tron have done some awfully creative stuff without a real drummer, and then there’s Meshuggah, who tracked drums on Catch Thirtythree and the rejiggered version of Nothing with the same Drumkit from Hell software used on Agorapocalypse. For verisimilitude, variety and straight audacity, though, nobody beats Hull at the drum programming game.
And don’t take my word for it! Pig Destroyer’s new drummer Adam Jarvis tells us, “When I first heard the new Pig Destroyer tracks ,I was mostly impressed by the flow and precision of Scott’s drum programming. I thought I was going to have to reprogram certain things, but after hearing what he laid down it’s pretty much the final product.” Jarvis also claims that Hull has a violent, alcoholic pet octopus in his control room that programs all of Scott’s drums for him, so we got a second opinion from our #11 honoree Dave Witte, who practiced with Pig Destroyer for a while. Witte says, “Scott Hull can program realistic sounding drums and drum patterns better than anyone I know or have heard, especially in the metal world. No one can touch him. His challenging ideas are of the utmost in quality and meticulous attention to detail. I’ve seen him doing it, each hit by hit, dynamics, hesitations, everything. He makes you believe it’s a real drum… He claims he has me in mind when he maps things out. I tell him he’s crazy.”
http://www.metalsucks.net/2012/03/30/1-scott-hull-agoraphobic-nosebleed/