Gang of Four..ty Million

I’m working on this year’s Christmas songs and my wife wants to join the fray. She claims she’s doing it because I’ve been bugging her, but in reality last year she got pissed because she wasn’t included. Plus she thought last year’s song (Christmastime), which received the best reviews by far of all of my friends, was too sappy.

So this year, I’m doing two songs: one for her, and one for Sara. Her song is Gaga’s You and I (set with her own lyrics, about a 35 year old woman who still believes in Santa). I’m 99% done with the backing tracks but I’m having one challenge: how to get the drums in the beginning to sound like they do.

You know the drum sound I’m talking about. It’s the one that Queen made famous with We Will Rock You. How do I get the drums to sound like I have forty million drummers playing at the same time?

At a guess, I would try inserting a delay effect which adds 2 or 3 extra hits very quickly after the original, and then use a reverb with a relatively long pre-delay and short length.
Which might sound horrendous, never tried it :stuck_out_tongue:

Hire a drummer, tell him to play pop 4/4 no fills or frills and feed him a 90bpm click track in the cans

This is from Wikipedia (search “we will rock you”):
“The stamping effects were created by the band overdubbing the sounds of themselves stomping and clapping many times and adding delay effects to create a sound like many people were participating. The durations of the delays were in the ratios of prime numbers, a technique now known as non-harmonic reverberation.”

I remember hearing an interview with Brian May on this, and the Wikipedia accounts seems right.

Aloha,
Very kool.
{‘-’}

Yeah, that’s similar to what I just did. The concept works. Here are my settings. The reverb follows the delay immediately.

The reverb preset name is mine. :smiley: