The article is totally overlooking that fact that a band like Green Day has such sloppy musicianship that it's all cleaned up in Pro-tools after the fact. Tre' Cool could be drunk and high and lay down the worst tracks ever without a click and a good Pro-tools guy could make it look flat. So, the sterility is probably coming from over Pro-tooling, and not necessarily playing to click track. The insinuation that there are REAL drums on "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is just offensive. No words can describe how insulting that is.
I also take issue to Bonham not having used a click. I have several original out-takes from the studio, and not only is there a (granted, prehistoric) click track going in the form of a loud metronome in the studio. He's also laying the beat down on some tunes AFTER the other musicians have layed theirs down (presumably to the loud metronome clicky thingy)...playing to pre-recorded music is the same thing as playing to a click, as far as the sterility aspect goes. And if anyone wants to argue that Led Zeppelin's music sounded sterile, than I have no faith in humans.
Lastly, this over-analysis of an article is overlooking the most basic premise of music. So what if it is clicked, not clicked, rushing, dragging....does it SOUND good?
Ringo gets praise for one thing...being left-handed on a right-handed drum kit made him come up with a lot of strange fills. "Perfectly even" tempo is NOT his trait, rather, the odd, somewhat rushed feeling of sticking 5 notes (because he is left handed on a righty drum kit) where four would normally go. The only thing Keith Moon had going for him was Animal from the muppets was created in his image...not sure that's something to be proud of;-)
To give Apple engineers a little more credit, the click pad seems to work better closer to the bottom of the track pad, which is feels more natural because we've grown accustom to the buttons being there, not because it is a superior position. On my MacBook, I turn the right click on and still tend to go towards the bottom right corner, even though I don't have to go that far. It's nice NOT to have two physical buttons under your palms that can be clicked when touch-typing. Worse, like most poorly designed generic pcs, are buttons that are hard to click and hold while you are using the trackpad, or hard to click the left mouse button with your right thumb without accidentally clicking the right mouse button.
No time now, but you can have the short answer...nobody sounds like Bonham; you know it's Bonham when you hear it; and, well, nobody sounds like Bonham.
I haven't seen all the old videos and concert footage, but it really doesn't matter. Even if he is or isn't flashy, it can't take away from that sound. One of my most prized possessions is about 50 Bonham out-takes, in their entirety...just Bonham on drums (with some conversation between him and the sound engineers). He nails all of his tracks, mostly in one take too. He was also the master of the triplet fill and the shuffle beat. Prior to Bonham, there weren't many pop-music drummers that could drop the "Purdie Shuffle" like him. Even now, after hundreds have drummers have copped his licks and ripped his fills, his playing is relevant, and fresh. Even though a lot of his credit comes from being an early pioneer in his style (guys just weren't playing that stuff at that time...listen to Ringo and Watts, for comparison), it still sounds great today, which you can't say for all pioneering music (1980s drum pads, anyone?)
Other great drummers that are totally under-appreciated by the average fan include the greatest living drummer, Steve Gadd, Jeff Porcaro, Steve Smith (cheesy Journey stuff included), Vinnie Coliauta...to name a few.
No, I'm just saying that many fans confuse "celebrity" with "good drumming". Unless you want to argue that celebrity should count, I think we can see eye-to-eye on this. Being famous does not necessarily equate to being good. And before anybody challenges it, yes, I actually am a better drummer than many celebrity drummers that come up in these sort of conversations...
Graphic Designers make half what most engineers do, but they almost always have nice macs.
"Graphic Designers" is a broad definition. I make very close to 6-figures in the "Graphic Design" field. Very few of the software engineers here at my work make 75k, which isn't quite twice as much as my 90K. And yes, I do have several "nice macs", but I also have a few "boring" Dells as well.
I'm not sure it's a "poor move". I would imagine you'd need two 4gb ram chips to get the 8gb mark. How much do single 4gb ram chips sell for these days (quick internet search says $250-$450). I'd stick with the 4gb stock and upgrade in a year when the stuff is dirt cheap.
* I hate backing up/home/username. I just really want to backup my documents & mail & a few other things. So, either I back up the whole gargantuan mess, or just my documents. Rooting around for all the necessary prefs files is a PITB.
Well I suppose you could replace "Apple" with "Dell", since that's the usual comparison...and the Mac Pros are hundreds of dollars cheaper (not sure that's still true, though).
A more valid comparison would be, "I can get a cheapie, ugly-ass Acer/HP/Dell with a 2.4gb C2Duo, 500gb hard drive, a 19" monitor and 4gbs of ram for $600, but I can't get a good Mac for under $1200.
People that want the Apple name in their house and dont understand the the the price they are paying is not worth the equipment they are getting.
Thanks for setting me straight, because everybody values the same things you do, I suppose. For the record, the prices I paid for each of my four current Macs were very much worth every penny...TO ME. Since it is my money, please go away. I could sit here and belittle you for being a cheap bastard, but I won't.
I've actually played Crysis with decent results on my two year old 2.4ghz iMac (with 2gb of ram and the bigger video card option, Radeon X1600 256mb). I imagine it would be even more playable with the nvidia card in the 24" iMacs and the newer faster Core2Duo chips. It plays better on my iMac than my old "gaming rig" pentium 4 of roughly the same age, with a better video card.
Except that the entire track pad is now a button. For the past five years the complaint was, "but two finger click isn't the same thing as two PHYSICAL buttons!". Now they've made the entire track pad a button that has multiple zones that act as, at a minimum, two buttons. Click anywhere on the left half of the track pad and you get a left click--click anywhere on the right half of the track pad and you get a right click. Why limit yourself to two buttons at the bottom of a pad? So yes, the "one button" argument IS old, and hasn't been valid since Mac OS 7.6 about 15 years ago.
On the flip side, I'm not convinced that thousands of reluctant buyers would suddenly spring for a Mac-mini if it were $100 cheaper. If you wanted one in the first place, and given the lack of competition for that sort of rig, most people aren't gonna hold out because they think it should be $100 less--they are going to buy it, because they want it. Lowering the price by 20% is not going to entice a lot of people who weren't interested in a crippled, small-form fact computer in the first place.
You lost all credibility at "one mouse button". Seriously people, drop this 15-year old myth! If you want to be pedantic, the Macbooks are now a NO-button mouse or an ALL-button mouse.
They still charge a UK price, regardless of dollar:sterling rate. What I don't know (and haven't read enough of this thread) is if they raised the mini from, say 499 to 599 sterling for an arbitrary reason, or if the new models are the same price as the old (which is the Apple norm).
People have been saying this for years, and yet it doesn't seem to have hurt Apple's sales in all that time.
How do you know if it never happened? What would Apple sales look like if they offered a $600 tower? I bet it would give them a bigger market share, even if it doesn't net them as much cash in sales profit. But it's Apple's call, not mine.
Bonham--so good he doesn't get enough praise (and he gets a lot)
Watts -- not sure what "great time, even at his age means, but any drummer that has been recorded should have at least good time..in any case, top 10 over-rated celebrity drummer if there ever was one. People point to his jazz playing, but nobody in the jazz world points to his jazz playing...just sayin'
Ginger Baker--what do coffee and Ginger Baker have in common? They both suck without Cream. Actually I have no opinion on him, as I don't really know any music other than the few songs on the classic rock channels.
Frank Beard--is an interesting one, because watching him live, he plays like every beginner student I've ever seen...holds the sticks wrong, hits the cymbals with bad technique...but if you listen to the recordings, there's some really really good stuff on there. He just doesn't pull it off live, though. He's a solid, simplistic drummer, but not quite to the legendary simple status as say, Phil Rudd.
Carl Palmer--one of the best...if you are into that prog sort of thing. Not really my cuppa tea, so to speak.
He's another over-playing guy that gets a lot of attention from non-drummers (and drummers alike, for that matter). Not to be negative-nancy, but when "best" drummer topic ever comes up, the list is predictable (but not very accurate).
I have a 1999 G4 tower. I upgraded the CPU from 400mhz to 800mhz about 4-5 years ago and added some ram. But yeah, then I've purchased three Mac laptops and two iMacs since then, because frankly, I've never really needed to upgrade./andecdote
It would be nice to have a $500-ish tower with specs similar to a Dell Inspiron 530 though.
It's not about NEEDING a click-track. I say again, good drummers can and do play to a click. Bad drummers simply can't play to a click track, so what's the point in trying to make them?
I see your point about popularist drummers (non-drummer drummers) and you've brought up the KING of them in Neil Peart. As a drummer, I like Rush's music and the drum parts, but I'm not particularly blown away. If you dissect what Peart plays, you'll see a definite repetition in his licks. Nothing wrong with having your own style, but I don't see much progress (even though he claims to be progressive) in his playing. Also, if I can play it, it isn't amazing;-)
Stewart Copeland on the other hand...one of my inspirations and most influential guys ever.
I usually avoid stating the obvious, like Ringo is over-rated (or Charlie Watts), because they carry such a rabid-irrational fan-base, there's no point in holding a logical discussion about them. The main argument I hear about Ringo is that he is the MAIN reason so many people got into drumming...yeah, if you are 40+ years old. I'm almost 40, but have never been impressed with such classic drum tracks as "She Loves Me" and "I wanna hold your hand"...
just sayin' it's impossible for some people to separate celebrity from talent.
Slashdot Mirror
The article is totally overlooking that fact that a band like Green Day has such sloppy musicianship that it's all cleaned up in Pro-tools after the fact. Tre' Cool could be drunk and high and lay down the worst tracks ever without a click and a good Pro-tools guy could make it look flat. So, the sterility is probably coming from over Pro-tooling, and not necessarily playing to click track. The insinuation that there are REAL drums on "Hit Me Baby One More Time" is just offensive. No words can describe how insulting that is.
I also take issue to Bonham not having used a click. I have several original out-takes from the studio, and not only is there a (granted, prehistoric) click track going in the form of a loud metronome in the studio. He's also laying the beat down on some tunes AFTER the other musicians have layed theirs down (presumably to the loud metronome clicky thingy)...playing to pre-recorded music is the same thing as playing to a click, as far as the sterility aspect goes. And if anyone wants to argue that Led Zeppelin's music sounded sterile, than I have no faith in humans.
Lastly, this over-analysis of an article is overlooking the most basic premise of music. So what if it is clicked, not clicked, rushing, dragging....does it SOUND good?
Ringo gets praise for one thing...being left-handed on a right-handed drum kit made him come up with a lot of strange fills. "Perfectly even" tempo is NOT his trait, rather, the odd, somewhat rushed feeling of sticking 5 notes (because he is left handed on a righty drum kit) where four would normally go. The only thing Keith Moon had going for him was Animal from the muppets was created in his image...not sure that's something to be proud of ;-)
To give Apple engineers a little more credit, the click pad seems to work better closer to the bottom of the track pad, which is feels more natural because we've grown accustom to the buttons being there, not because it is a superior position. On my MacBook, I turn the right click on and still tend to go towards the bottom right corner, even though I don't have to go that far. It's nice NOT to have two physical buttons under your palms that can be clicked when touch-typing. Worse, like most poorly designed generic pcs, are buttons that are hard to click and hold while you are using the trackpad, or hard to click the left mouse button with your right thumb without accidentally clicking the right mouse button.
No time now, but you can have the short answer...nobody sounds like Bonham; you know it's Bonham when you hear it; and, well, nobody sounds like Bonham.
I haven't seen all the old videos and concert footage, but it really doesn't matter. Even if he is or isn't flashy, it can't take away from that sound. One of my most prized possessions is about 50 Bonham out-takes, in their entirety...just Bonham on drums (with some conversation between him and the sound engineers). He nails all of his tracks, mostly in one take too. He was also the master of the triplet fill and the shuffle beat. Prior to Bonham, there weren't many pop-music drummers that could drop the "Purdie Shuffle" like him. Even now, after hundreds have drummers have copped his licks and ripped his fills, his playing is relevant, and fresh. Even though a lot of his credit comes from being an early pioneer in his style (guys just weren't playing that stuff at that time...listen to Ringo and Watts, for comparison), it still sounds great today, which you can't say for all pioneering music (1980s drum pads, anyone?)
Other great drummers that are totally under-appreciated by the average fan include the greatest living drummer, Steve Gadd, Jeff Porcaro, Steve Smith (cheesy Journey stuff included), Vinnie Coliauta...to name a few.
No, I'm just saying that many fans confuse "celebrity" with "good drumming". Unless you want to argue that celebrity should count, I think we can see eye-to-eye on this. Being famous does not necessarily equate to being good. And before anybody challenges it, yes, I actually am a better drummer than many celebrity drummers that come up in these sort of conversations...
Graphic Designers make half what most engineers do, but they almost always have nice macs.
"Graphic Designers" is a broad definition. I make very close to 6-figures in the "Graphic Design" field. Very few of the software engineers here at my work make 75k, which isn't quite twice as much as my 90K. And yes, I do have several "nice macs", but I also have a few "boring" Dells as well.
I'm not sure it's a "poor move". I would imagine you'd need two 4gb ram chips to get the 8gb mark. How much do single 4gb ram chips sell for these days (quick internet search says $250-$450). I'd stick with the 4gb stock and upgrade in a year when the stuff is dirt cheap.
* I hate backing up /home/username. I just really want to backup my documents & mail & a few other things. So, either I back up the whole gargantuan mess, or just my documents. Rooting around for all the necessary prefs files is a PITB.
Time Machine. Ur doin' it wrong.
This may sound odd to those of you with little disposable income, but OS X is worth whatever I can afford more than ANY flavor of Windows.
Well I suppose you could replace "Apple" with "Dell", since that's the usual comparison...and the Mac Pros are hundreds of dollars cheaper (not sure that's still true, though).
A more valid comparison would be, "I can get a cheapie, ugly-ass Acer/HP/Dell with a 2.4gb C2Duo, 500gb hard drive, a 19" monitor and 4gbs of ram for $600, but I can't get a good Mac for under $1200.
People that want the Apple name in their house and dont understand the the the price they are paying is not worth the equipment they are getting.
Thanks for setting me straight, because everybody values the same things you do, I suppose. For the record, the prices I paid for each of my four current Macs were very much worth every penny...TO ME. Since it is my money, please go away. I could sit here and belittle you for being a cheap bastard, but I won't.
I've actually played Crysis with decent results on my two year old 2.4ghz iMac (with 2gb of ram and the bigger video card option, Radeon X1600 256mb). I imagine it would be even more playable with the nvidia card in the 24" iMacs and the newer faster Core2Duo chips. It plays better on my iMac than my old "gaming rig" pentium 4 of roughly the same age, with a better video card.
Except that the entire track pad is now a button. For the past five years the complaint was, "but two finger click isn't the same thing as two PHYSICAL buttons!". Now they've made the entire track pad a button that has multiple zones that act as, at a minimum, two buttons. Click anywhere on the left half of the track pad and you get a left click--click anywhere on the right half of the track pad and you get a right click. Why limit yourself to two buttons at the bottom of a pad? So yes, the "one button" argument IS old, and hasn't been valid since Mac OS 7.6 about 15 years ago.
On the flip side, I'm not convinced that thousands of reluctant buyers would suddenly spring for a Mac-mini if it were $100 cheaper. If you wanted one in the first place, and given the lack of competition for that sort of rig, most people aren't gonna hold out because they think it should be $100 less--they are going to buy it, because they want it. Lowering the price by 20% is not going to entice a lot of people who weren't interested in a crippled, small-form fact computer in the first place.
You lost all credibility at "one mouse button". Seriously people, drop this 15-year old myth! If you want to be pedantic, the Macbooks are now a NO-button mouse or an ALL-button mouse.
They still charge a UK price, regardless of dollar:sterling rate. What I don't know (and haven't read enough of this thread) is if they raised the mini from, say 499 to 599 sterling for an arbitrary reason, or if the new models are the same price as the old (which is the Apple norm).
People have been saying this for years, and yet it doesn't seem to have hurt Apple's sales in all that time.
How do you know if it never happened? What would Apple sales look like if they offered a $600 tower? I bet it would give them a bigger market share, even if it doesn't net them as much cash in sales profit. But it's Apple's call, not mine.
Did you really just nit-pick a $100 price difference?
Bonham--so good he doesn't get enough praise (and he gets a lot)
Watts -- not sure what "great time, even at his age means, but any drummer that has been recorded should have at least good time..in any case, top 10 over-rated celebrity drummer if there ever was one. People point to his jazz playing, but nobody in the jazz world points to his jazz playing...just sayin'
Ginger Baker--what do coffee and Ginger Baker have in common? They both suck without Cream. Actually I have no opinion on him, as I don't really know any music other than the few songs on the classic rock channels.
Frank Beard--is an interesting one, because watching him live, he plays like every beginner student I've ever seen...holds the sticks wrong, hits the cymbals with bad technique...but if you listen to the recordings, there's some really really good stuff on there. He just doesn't pull it off live, though. He's a solid, simplistic drummer, but not quite to the legendary simple status as say, Phil Rudd.
Carl Palmer--one of the best...if you are into that prog sort of thing. Not really my cuppa tea, so to speak.
He's another over-playing guy that gets a lot of attention from non-drummers (and drummers alike, for that matter). Not to be negative-nancy, but when "best" drummer topic ever comes up, the list is predictable (but not very accurate).
I have a 1999 G4 tower. I upgraded the CPU from 400mhz to 800mhz about 4-5 years ago and added some ram. But yeah, then I've purchased three Mac laptops and two iMacs since then, because frankly, I've never really needed to upgrade. /andecdote
It would be nice to have a $500-ish tower with specs similar to a Dell Inspiron 530 though.
It's not about NEEDING a click-track. I say again, good drummers can and do play to a click. Bad drummers simply can't play to a click track, so what's the point in trying to make them?
I see your point about popularist drummers (non-drummer drummers) and you've brought up the KING of them in Neil Peart. As a drummer, I like Rush's music and the drum parts, but I'm not particularly blown away. If you dissect what Peart plays, you'll see a definite repetition in his licks. Nothing wrong with having your own style, but I don't see much progress (even though he claims to be progressive) in his playing. Also, if I can play it, it isn't amazing ;-)
Stewart Copeland on the other hand...one of my inspirations and most influential guys ever.
I usually avoid stating the obvious, like Ringo is over-rated (or Charlie Watts), because they carry such a rabid-irrational fan-base, there's no point in holding a logical discussion about them. The main argument I hear about Ringo is that he is the MAIN reason so many people got into drumming...yeah, if you are 40+ years old. I'm almost 40, but have never been impressed with such classic drum tracks as "She Loves Me" and "I wanna hold your hand"...
just sayin' it's impossible for some people to separate celebrity from talent.
I've heard Deitch...good stuff. I'm a big fan of Keith Carlock myself. And of course my Facebook religious preference reads: "Church of Gadd".
Or Travis Barker, or Mike Portnoy, or any other long list of extremely over rated (yet popular) drummers of their respective times.