HW: drums on Electric Tepee

[Doug Pearson]

On Thu, 20 Sep 2001 00:15:19 +0200, Denis Regenbrecht
<denis.regenbrecht at UNIBW-MUENCHEN.DE> wrote:
>Hi Alice,
>
>>How do you think: Are the drums on this album are drumcomputer or it is
>>Richard playing and they just made the sound artificial?
>>Alice
>
>I think it's both: cool Richard Chadwick live drumming _and_ good drumcomp
>programming.

It's almost certainly both.  I assume that's the album where Richard
started using triggered drum machines along with live drumming.  Closeup
concert photos of his kit these days reveal a number of drum/sample
machines behind him, which he triggers during performances (one of the best
examples of this would be the "Space Is Their" segment of "Hassan i Sahba").

Having said that, 'Electric Teepee' was also the first album Hawkwind
recorded "at home", rather than in professional studios (mostly Rockfield
in Wales; 'Space Bandits' was the last album HW recorded there).  Since
they're acoustic by nature, it's MUCH more difficult to get good sounds out
of a drumkit than from guitar/bass/synth, so the fact that 'Electric
Teepee' was (I assume) recorded without expensive microphones, NOT in an
acoustically-engineered room, could easily account for a lesser drum
sound.  I would also suspect that Richard's "live" parts were recorded with
a click track, which (obviously) can tend to make real drumming sound more
mechanical, like a drum machine.  Improved technology (both in recording
AND in live/MIDI interfacing) and greater familiarity/more experience with
whatever room the drums are recorded in have led to better drum sounds on
subsequent HW albums.

    -Doug
     jasret at mindspring.com