I mean, this absurd and I bring it up because I just watched part of a UAD video touting one of their many plugin's for drums. I'll tell ya that I've had a hell of a time with the drums that I've worked with so far. I don't record my own drums because I don't have the space for it so I outsource them to a friend/acquaintance who's actually a drummer so you'd think he's got a pretty good grip on drum recording, right? Most of the drums that I get back from him are so challenging for me to work with that I almost always resort to at least some level of drum replacement. When watching these sample videos, though, you'd think that everyone is working with drum sounds the likes of polished Phil Collin's stuff. I mean, it's ridiculous. If I had that great of sounding raw tracks to begin with, well, I wouldn't be researching how to make this sound good, would I?!
All this does, and I'm sure it's the very intent of course, is make you the user feel like a dumb *ss, like you don't know what you're doing and therefore NEED this stupid plugin that they're selling. Well, friends, this is all complete and utter bullsh*t and just marketing, at least in my opinion. Shame on these companies and anyone who posts these sorts of videos because you're not doing any service to anyone who is trying to do something creative by making them feel bad about their work. Grr.
Drums are really tough and they're central to the whole recording. I've found that if the drums don't sound right, don't fit the space, don't have the proper energy to mix with the other elements of the song, you basically end up with a very strange output. They're simply crucial and whereas I'm sure I have a lot more to learn about how to properly mix drums since I'm no expert, I don't think I'm exactly the only one who isn't working with not great sounding raw tracks. A lot of the same words can be said about raw electric guitar tracks. Way too many times these videos are working with polished audio and I know that because raw guitar tracks simply don't sound like that...they're, um, raw, not polished.
Here's another small piece of advice/complaint that I've run across countless times. I don't know why more of these "how to" videos don't right up front talk about what kind of music they're working with. Duh. For example, I was really struggling with vocals recently and did some research, and there are countless "how to EQ vocals" videos out there. You'd think they'd say up front "this is for rock" or "this is for rap"; I mean, the approach here is way different. So, if you're not careful, you can jot down a bunch of notes about EQ'ing vocals and it'll end up sounding bizarre, and you're left scratching your head wondering how you could be so stupid that this doesn't work for you...when all along you're mixing country and they're talking about hip hop :) I just don't get it.
Okay, that's my rant for the day. My mixing projects are actually going really well. "Mirror Land" is pretty much on target for the 4/1 release but I may be slightly late, depending upon how backed up the mastering is. "Petty Cash" is just about done and Defrost Nixon continues to transform into something more and more listenable every day. I'll post more soon on these releases when I have an update.