Travis Orbin - The Gabriel Construct Session: Fear of Humanity
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In Gabe's original demo, the drums were super processed-sounding for the whole intro, but in my head I first heard them sounding gigantic and exaggerated. I opted to use two floor toms (my usual Reference Pure, along with a 16"x16" Vision on my left) to express this, and further embellished the closed hat groove that follows -- texturally -- with my chunky 15" MDM hats and an 8"x14" Pearl maple snare (stock head).
Many months after tracking, Gabe kindly picked me up from the airport after my Drum Channel appearance, as he was in the middle of mixing the record at Oceanic and wasn't far away. We were listening to a rough mix of the tune in the car and it was then that an idea/concept of how the second half of the intro could sound presented itself to me. I suggested a weird, crescendoing wall-of-noise affect into a roomy drum sound (2:38) and Gabe was into it. Killer!
When the song comes crashing back in after the brief break (3:30), the gear changes to my more commonly used brass Reference snare/rack tom. The cymbal setup is the same as in "Subway Dwellers", although I used a 'stack' instead of a splash and an 18" DRK flat ride on my right side.
There's a ton of vocal complementation is this tune: 2:49, 3:09 (snare flams), 3:58 - 4:00 (cymbal melody), 4:10 - 4:12 (stack), 5:16 - 5:18 (stack), 5:18 - 5:22 (cymbal melody), 5:43 (stack), 6:28 - 6:30 (stack), 7:44 - 7:45 (cymbal melody). There's also some tricky, syncopated fill-ins and a dual ride part at 6:38.