Got drums?

A long time ago I was mixing some songs for a younger band. Their producer/manager had already warned me, that the drums might be a little off. To say the least, the drums was really far off. Like, not keeping the tempo off. The rest of music was not that bad. The bass was a little off too (probably because the drums), but the vocal and guitar was nice.

I ask the manager if they can redo the drums, but he insists on me trying to fix them. I tell him it might required a lot of work and would probably make the drums unrecognizable for the drummer. The manager insisted.

So I went on to salvage the drums. I took more time than doing a good couple of re-takes with a good drummer. First I had to live every hit up in time. Then I replaced most of the drum sounds with samples, and the time realignment had messed with the already bad sounding recording. Then I tried blending some of the original drums sounds into the mix, to actually have just some of the original recording in the song. After the first listen from the manager, he asked me to get rid of the original sound all together.

The drummer never noticed. I don’t know if that’s funny or scary.