Alternative Drummer | Underground Drumming | Electronic Drums | Experimental Percussion

Alternative Drummer recently got to ask experimental electronic musician and drummer David Fanhauser, AKA Parallax some questions. He not only answered all of our questions in detail, he also provided us with this amazing gear tour!  Parallax is based in Switzerland and be sure to subscribe to his YouTube Channel here!  Check out the full interview below! AD: What got you interested in experimenting with electronics and drums? Dave: I‘ve always been a big fan of musicians like Jojo Mayer, Zach Danziger, Mark Guiliana… those guys who dig into genres that are typically not in the realm of „normal“ drumming. It always fascinated me how they push the instrument with the way they approach it. I tried mimicking them in my playing, which was always more fun to me than playing along to, let’s say, „Top 20 Hits Music“. Besides drumming in my free time, I was also intensly listening to electronic music from artists like Aphex Twin, Four Tet, Flying Lotus, and so on… music that typically doesn

  Though Rhett claims " I don't go into extreme detail on everything in my setup" he actually does an amazing job of explaining all of his gear in this video and how it all works together! This one is highly educational.  If you were ever wondering how to combine backing tracks, with acoustic drums, with external triggers, with a Roland SPD, with your own personal in ear mix, this video lays it all out perfectly.  With a Macbook, a small mixer, audio interface, and a small footprint kit, Rhett has created one amazingly cool and versatile setup! Check out his awesome YouTube channel here! Rhett has performed at Lollapalooza, Bumbershoot Festival, and worked with artists such as Jagwar Twin and Avril Lavigne!

 If you've seen Jay Weinberg of Slipknot's awesome drum cover of Youth Code's track Puzzle, you might be wondering what patch he was using on the Roland TD-50 to get that awesome drum sound. That's exactly what I did when I heard it. I thought to myself, hmmm, I have a TD-27, does it have those samples? Turns out this isn't a TD-50 patch at all, and you could get this same exact drum sounds using not only a TD-27, but even with a $379 Alesis Nitro kit, rather than a $5000 Roland TD-50 (though I'm sure the feel of the Roland would be much more realistic).  Check out the video then read below for the details on how to get the sounds! The way Weinberg achieved this sound was though a drum sample library by Kurt Ballou called 'Room Sound'.  The way that this works is you purchase the sample library through the website above ($89), then load it into Kontakt 6. Kontakt 6 is a sampler plugin that runs on Mac and Windows, and they also offer a free version call

  Josh Dun is the solid drummer behind the duo Twenty One Pilots. He plays an important role in the band since they are only a two piece with a lot of live sequencing going on via Ableton Live and Josh is the one starting and stopping all of these during the set without ever touching a laptop.  What is really cool about this setup is it's compact(ish) but he's doing quite a lot with it. The basic acoustic part of the set is a 4 piece drum kit, but you'll notice 3 Yamaha Silicone pads, a popcorn snare, a Roland SPD-SX and an iPad. There's no laptop next to the kit, because he is mirroring the screen on the iPad to his left. All the controls are done with pads and footswitches. This can all be configured within Ableton, which even though it is backing tracks, you still have control over them while playing drums. 

  Did you know that you don't even need a trigger on your bass drum to trigger a sample with it? In fact this is what first got me into hybrid drumming before I ever setup my hybrid set.  There's a couple ways of doing this, but the way I am going to talk about in this post is with drum replacement software.  Drum replacers usually run as an audio plugin that you use in conjunction with your DAW such as Ableton or Pro Tools. They are really useful actually, especially on a particularly troublesome kick drum or snare drum.  They way that they work is they use the incoming audio signal from say.... a bass drum (though you can use any drum) then uses the sound it's self to trigger the sample. You can usually blend the natural sound with the triggered sound as well. One of the most popular and best drum replacement plugins is called Drumagog ! I used it on a lot of my album Earth Asylum . Actually on every song except one. When I was recording that album I was using a Tama Im

 Thanks to Drum Magazine  for uploading this amazing clip of drummer, Brendan Buckley and his completely mind boggling hybrid drum setup he was playing with Shakira on her 2018 tour.  I can't imagine how crazy it would have been for the drum techs getting all of this set up every night and making sure everything was working fine before the gig. Seems pretty stressful! In the video Brendan explains how he uses Battery by NI for all his sounds. I would have liked to have seen maybe a bit more setup details in that regard. Like what kind of interface he's using, buffer settings etc...  Oh well, still a very cool video, whether you're a Shakira fan or not!