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Australian Musician Issue 15 Spring 98

Dave Plenty by Greg Phillips

Dave Plenty is one of those musicians whose sounds are regularly heard yet his face is rarely seen. He's a session musician and one of the most in demand drummers in Australia. His credits include Human Nature, Grace Knight, Jenny Morris, Frank Gambale and for a time was beating skins as a member of the chart topping band 1927. After a two year stint in America where he soaked up some of the finest percussion sagacity on offer, he returned to take up a position at the Australian Institute of Music as Head of Percussion as well as working as a product specialist for Roland. Australian Musician's Greg Phillips tracked down Dave and asked him about all things percussive.

You are now Head of Percussion at the institute, how important do you see a formal drum education?
Absolutely important. In this day and age you can't afford not to be skilled in every area stylistically. You need to have the whole gamut covered.It is very competitive now with so many young guys out there really working hard. If you are going to do sessions and be a freelance player and you're not flexible then I can't see how you're going to be competitive.

What type of acoustic kit do you own now?
I use Yamaha 9000's with Sabian cymbals who I am endorsed by as well. All birch shells and they're great sounding drums.

Are you the type of musician who is comfortably with one set up or are you constantly looking for new things?
I think as you grow as a player, so does your set up. Of course doing what I do, you wouldn't take a jazz kit to a rock gig and vice versa. You have to have almost a drum shop worth of drums to do what I do. My set up is constantly changing. On a bigger gig like the Australia Day gig at the Myer Music bowl with Human Nature, you want a look as well as the playing thing. You want to have as many rack toms as you can get, that's what the band wants but if I'm just doing a gig down the road in George Street I'll just take 4 drums along and 2 cymbals. Being able to say what you want to say on either kit is important.

As far as technology in music goes we all remember Kraftwork and Tangerine Dream with their keyboards and for years guitarists have had effects pedals to create sounds with but until now it was perceived that drum technology had always lagged behind...

I think it's been slow coming and it's a different instrument obviously. The one thing that has set electronic drums back is the way they trigger and their feel. In the early days when the Simmons drums came out they were hard pads and it was like playing a table top. They didn't respond like a plastic skin, they didn't have that give. Companies like Roland have recognised these problems and put a lot of work into it. In fact the TD10 module, or the VDrums has been 17 years in the making. What they didn't have was a processor powerful enough to capture all the little nuances that were going on. They have developed pads that are actual drum skins with a trigger, real tuning hoops just like an acoustic kit would have. What you have now is trigger response that rivals any acoustic drum kit. With the VDrums or Virtual Drums, you can edit those to any parameter, tonality, pitch, feel or sensitivity to get the exact feel of an acoustic kit.

In layman's terms, how do the V Drums work?
It would have to be in layman's terms because I'm no techno whiz. Essentially you hit a pad, a signal travels through to the module and it triggers a sound. Previously when you did that, for instance with Simmons drums, all you were triggering was a sampled sound, a 2 dimensional sound and all you could edit was the pitch and volume. With VDrums it's not a sample, it's a virtual sound, and every parameter is fully editable. In other words you can change the material of the shell, from brass to metal to wood, you can change the head from coated head to oil filled head etc. You can obviously change the depth of the drum. The materials that make up the instrument denote the type of sound you want to achieve. You can also change the environment of the drum. You can actually design the size of the room, and the material the walls of the room are made of whether it's wood or plaster or glass or whatever. You can add effects... so what you have is a complete production module right there. So you are designing your instrument, you're designing the room it's put in and then you are mixing it down in the control room, even to the point of what type of microphone you want on the drum and what distance you want the mike from the drum head. So you could listen to your favourite CD and say " I want that Steve Gadd snare drum sound" and recreate that. That's what VDrums are doing, they're virtually recreating drum sounds.
And it's really easy to use.It's designed for drummers after all! Keyboard players have had synths for years and can go 3 or 4 layers into a parameter and know what they are doing. When drum machines came along they essentially put that technology into the modules and drummers were going 'hang on, I hit things what is this stuff". What Roland did was to put an LED read out that came up with a picture of a drum itself. So when you vary the depth of the shell , you see the shell expand, when you change the head you see the drum head come up.

How would you amplify the VDrums in a live situation?
You can direct it out through left and right stereo sends and throw it out to the mixing desk, straight out to front of house. You can bring your own monitoring along say a wedge or keyboard amp or have it through the foldback that exists if it's a large enough production. What I tend to do is just give left and right out to the desk, the mixer puts a little bit back through the foldback and what I do is wear a head set to get a real direct contact to the ears type mix. I like mixing my own sound. The guitarist and bass player can play as loud as they want and it doesn't effect me. I can play in a nice soft environment and get a great produced sound.

What are the advantages of V Drums in the studio?
Usually when you go and do a studio session you end up bringing a truck load of drums and cymbals so obviously with 600 sounds that are editable in the V Drums, what you have at any one time is 50 types of kits. So you have Chinese gongs or soup trays rattling in the kitchen or whatever, you have it there and it's fully editable. You might want that sound just a little sharper or something. You can have a bulldozer working outside and you're recording in a shack and it doesn't matter. Through left and right you can go straight into digital tape, there are no microphones to pick up the noises. Time is probably the biggest advantage. When you do an acoustic recording the first hour is spent just setting up microphones and tuning drums, with the VDrums you just throw the stereo line out and decide which sound you want and away you go.

 

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