Happy Monday, y’all!

There was a band I used to go see when I was a kid, the Little Wilson Band. They played R&B. They had a great singer, Al, but I used to watch the drummer. His name was Pat and he rarely played fills, and he always had a great groove going on. When Little Wilson played, the whole club danced.

Pat was a funky-ass drummer, and it wasn’t what he was playing, but how he was playing it. He’d bring his right hand up almost to his ear before bringing it down to hit the snare. On some songs he’d strike across the high hat rather than coming directly down on it. Even his posture had an effect: some songs he’d sit more in a lump, others he’d be on the edge of his stool.

When I was producing, I took what I’d learned from watching Pat and tweaked drummers' performances and grooves with little physical changes to their movements.

Here are some videos where the way people are playing is really what they are playing.

Dennis Davis

Dennis Davis was a jazz cat who played with David Bowie on seven consecutive albums through the seventies. Davis was part of the DAM rhythm section—along with Carlos Alomar on guitar and George Murray (can you figure out why they were called DAM?). These guys were Bowie’s funkiest.

There’s not a lot of video of Dennis Davis in which you can really see him playing, but I found this clip from Kimmydrums, who’s knocking out Davis’ parts on Fame. Note the changes in the groove across three sections, as the part slides all over the beat, sometimes behind, sometimes ahead, syncopated, shuffling, and constantly funky. Most of all, watch the variety of stick movements, tiny directional changes, posture adjustments, changes to her grip, the way she dances on her throne. It’s different for each pocket she plays.

Kimmydrums is a former session player turned massage therapist who’s now back behind the kit. In her videos she “embodies” the player she’s mimicking. Hell of a player. I’d love to have her on a session.

Ringo!

This video of Martina Barakoska knocking off Ringo’s fills on A Day in the Life kinda popped my brain out of my head. Arguably the most famous drum fills ever, Ms Barakoska does all sorts of things with her arms, leaning everywhere, and she really cops the feel of those fills perfectly. And they are WEIRD LOOKING fills. I’ve recorded a ton of drummers and this stuff doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen. Maybe it’s all the space between, or the long pauses in the middle of the fills, or maybe it’s seeing a drummer not playing constantly and trying to hit every drum and do every style of fill. Should it be so odd to see a drummer hit just the snare on 2 and 4 and do nothing else when it’s not a mic check?

Martina Barakoska is another amazing player. And she’s available for sessions!

God Help Us

I don’t sit around watching videos of women drummers. I also watch priests. Here’s Father Hyacinth Marie Cordell playing polyrhythms. Technically, he’s a great player, but after popping in on a number of his videos, it became clear he isn't groove-oriented. This video of him doing John Bonham features him in the same “body" as the polyrhythm clip and it sure doesn’t feel like Bonham although he’s playing all the same notes. Maybe he’d have more feel if he was playing along to the record, but to my eye, it looks like the groove isn’t his calling.

Fred

Many great dancers were fabulous drummers. Here’s Fred Astaire playing drums with his feet while tap dancing. Notice that the way he plays the drums has the same precise, elegant quality as his dancing. Fred was also great on a kit that wasn’t spread all over the floor. And again, his elegance of movement is present. How we do one thing is how we do everything.

El Estepario Siberiano is amazing, but can he tap dance while playing? I think not.

Coffy

Coffy was a “blaxploitation" movie that came out in 1973. It featured Pam Grier as an emergency room nurse getting revenge for her sister’s death from an overdose. How does Coffy get revenge? With a shotgun, killing pimps, drug dealers, and eventually her corrupt politician boyfriend. She shoots him in the crotch. His name is Howard.

Here’s a fun scene!

In the background you can hear a little wha wha guitar, some percussion...

Coffy had an AMAZING soundtrack by vibraphonist Roy Ayers.

Roy Ayers was a bop player who invented jazz funk, if one invents such a thing. The soundtrack of Coffy is more jazz-oriented than soundtracks to similar films, such as Shaft or Superfly, with Ayers cutting vibraphone solos all over it, vocals by DeeDee Bridgewater, harpsichords, and wonderful drums and percussion by Dennis Davis!

Coffy Soundtrack album - worth a listen, or five.

Apple Music

Spotify

YouTube

Maybe groove is less about shifting tracks ahead or back and more about shifting butt cheeks on the seat, or how you hold that stick?

Have a great week. Get your butt in the studio!

Luke

Happy Monday!

Gah!!! We hoped to have a new plug-in out this week, but it will be released in October. Note to self: don’t announce things unless it’s a sure thing.

There is a ton going on, though, at Korneff: new plug-ins, a bunch of plug-in updates that you’ve been asking for, some new collaborations with some very interesting entities and people, a booth at NAMM... the fun never ends.

Here’s a thing to listen to while you read...

Oh my... Scandinavian folk metal anyone? Would these guys absolutely crush the Cranberries in a fight? Judging by the video, they’d crush just about anyone in a fight.

Onward.

The last two New Mondays have been loosely connected by the math of overtones, or harmonics, and how that applies to equalization and last week, how saturation and distortion fall into this same mathematical black hole.

This is foundationally important stuff, and without a good sense of it, it’s really hard to have a firm grasp on all sorts of things. Understanding this will help you to know why use a limiter here and not there, or add saturation here and not there. Or why mixing in a perfectly in-tune guitar part can suddenly make the whole record sound out of tune.

It’s all about...

Inharmonicity

Ever notice how much a tuner jumps around when you first hit a note? It’s because the initial strike is essentially pitchless. It’s “inharmonic,” which isn’t a real word but inharmonicity is.

I found this video on why bells sound out of tune. It’s not a technical explanation of inharmonicity, but it is a great illustration of it.

Here’s a thing I wrote on inharmonicity. Don’t know this stuff? Read about it.

Intermodulation Distortion

The way equipment and devices, whether analog and tangible or digital, create inharmonicity is through something called Intermodulation Distortion.

It’s your friend, it’s your enemy... typically it’s your enemy. Here’s a video of a guy demonstrating it with a guitar.

Again, I wrote more on it here.

Ai Criminals

The music industry, in general, doesn’t know how to deal with Spotify and streaming services. Good guys? Bad guys? Evil? Necessary evil?

This guy ripped them off for millions and now he’s off to jail. Robin Hood? Jesse James? Michael Smith?

A Drum Trick

Here’s a tuning trick for floor toms, which are always a pain in the head it seems. I haven’t tried it yet, but it does appear to work, and why would someone fake this? It’s not like there’s millions to be made from Spotify with streams of it.

Vault of Marco

Marco strikes again with some very obscure and excellent early 70s soul from Marie “Queen” Lyons. What a fabulous singer. Bizarre mix. The whole thing is mono except for the horn part, which panned right with reverb on the left.

Marie made one record and then vanished into the mist of time.

Have a great week, y’all.

Happy New Monday!

Actor Donald Sutherland died last week.

I recalled he was in a Kate Bush video for the song Cloudbusting.

The song is an odd one, the video is a strange one, but it is Kate Bush, and she is one of those people who does whatever they want.

In the video, Sutherland and Kate Bush play a father and a son, based on psychologist Wilhelm Reich and his son, Peter, and inspired by Peter’s memoir A Book of Dreams.

Peter Reich adored his dad; his dad’s controversial ideas ended up getting him imprisoned — there’s a Kafka-esque scene in the video in which the father is taken away. Somehow Kate Bush turns it into a top twenty single.

Here’s a deeper dive into the making of the video.

You never know where inspiration might come from.

Humanizing Grooves: Pull and Push

In the studio, I always spent a lot of time on how things felt, on the groove of the song, whether it be humans or computers or a bit of both. On drum machines and software like that in Logic, or in packages like Superior Drummer, there are tons of options and controls, in addition to amazingly well-recorded drum sounds.

One of the key controls is whether the drum part is Pushed, or Pulled - pushed meaning the part is slightly ahead of the beat, pulled meaning slightly behind the beat.

Common thinking is that for something to sound funky and have a great groove to it, it should be pulled a bit behind the beat. I used to think so, but after experimenting and listening, I now think it is a lot more complex than that.

Here are some guidelines for your thinking on this. These aren’t rules but it's hard to find exceptions. Of course, this is all based on my hearing and feel for grooves. Your results might be different.

Guidelines for Grooves

Eight Notes are almost always pushed a bit ahead of the beat. And this makes sense from a physical perspective. Yes, there are swing rhythms involved too, but most rock and pop don’t swing all that much.

Listen to the hi-hat on this - it’s clearly pushed.

And kick is also Pushed. Which leads to...

Push kicks or whatever is doing four on the floor. Kicks are almost always slightly ahead, especially on 4 on the 4 stuff like this song here.

Note that these are all real drummers playing real kits. Next guideline:

The snare can be pulled. It's not always pulled, but very often it’s either pulled or the arrangement is doing something such that the snare seems to almost stop the flow of the song on two and four.

Listen to this.  The kick and hats are pushed, the snare is pulled, as is the bass.

This is Hella Good by No Doubt. Fantastic live in the studio playing by Adrian Young. Listen carefully: you’ll hear at the start the whole drum part is pushing, but the moment the band kicks in there’s a slight slowdown and that snare generally pulls back behind the beat.

Perhaps instead of thinking pulled on the snare, think getting a sense of the whole song stopping for a moment, like the snare cuts it for a split second.

On this recording, listen to the slight change in arrangement on the fourth beat of each measure - the hi-hats drop out.

That snare “pothole” that breaks the flow of the song is super critical to that groove, and to a lot of grooves. Reggae players always talk about leaving space.

This Childish Gambino tune has pushed hats and kicks, a pulled snare that has that song “cut” effect to it.

Speaking of Space

I watched a ridiculous Jason Stathem movie a few nights ago, The Beekeeper, and noticed that there was almost continual underscoring through all the dialog. It was distracting. Of course, we’re not talking great writing or great acting here so maybe it was needed, but the next night I watched episode 2 of House of the Dragon, and while the show is scored and orchestrated, it’s considerably less so than The Beekeeper.

Too much music, too much production - it can turn into a surrogate laugh track that indicates what you’re supposed to feel.

Space is good.
Thanks for existing in time and space with us,
The Guys at Korneff

Schönen Montag!

That’s German.

I’ve been bopping around Montreal’s subway system listening to Krautrock. It’s perfect music for trains and tunnels and feeling odd and alienated.

I went down a Krautrock rabbit hole. And this is your invitation to join me down there!

Krautrock... that is a terrible name, coined by British music journalists. I hope any German readers don’t find it offensive, and please feel free to correct or add to anything in this Neuer Montag.

It’s also ridiculously reductive. It’s applied to a variety of music recorded from about 1968 into the 1980s, that stylistically ranges from psychedelic jams to synth-based minimalism to prog rock with embarrassingly bad lyrics to punk to free jazz. As a genre, Krautrock is all over the place.

While a lot of it has a mechanical 4/4 beat known as “motorik,” the only commonalities seem to be a tendency towards experimentation and noise, and that it doesn’t have blues as a basis for chord structure or improvisation.

Whoops! Another commonality in Krautrock is a brilliant engineer/producer named...

Conny Plank

By brilliant, I mean Bill Putnam or Al Schmitt or Tom Dowd brilliant. An engineer’s engineer. Someone who not only knew where to put the mics, but also how to build the console. BRILLIANT. Conny Plank should really be much better known.

Konrad “Conny” Plank recorded or produced practically every group associated with Krautrock at one time or another. He also recorded albums for Scorpions, Eurythmics, Devo, Ultravox, Killing Joke, Brian Eno, and even Duke Ellington! Plank turned down working with David Bowie on the album that eventually became Low, (too much drugs, he thought). He also turned down working on U2’s Joshua Tree (too much Bono).

The center of his studio near Cologne was a 56-channel custom console, built to his own specifications and recording style with Michael Zahl, who now makes 500 series EQs and such.

Here is some vintage console porn. I love this stuff.

Plank also developed a recall system that used a camera suspended over the console to take a picture of the knobs. To recall this “snapshot” of the console, the film would be projected back through the camera onto the console and an assistant would turn the knobs to match the image projected onto them. Brilliant.

He also solved the problem of listening to finished mixes in the car: he built an illegal radio station in the studio. He and the clients would pile into his car, tune into the studio’s station, and wait for the assistant engineer to include the mix in a playlist of similar records. Again, brilliant.

And, of course, he was a virtuoso engineer, a huge believer in mic placement and working room acoustics. His recordings of percussion-based experimental jazz are fabulous, capturing everything with amazing clarity and precise stereo placement. He was also a master of tape manipulation, blessed with a fantastic memory that allowed him to edit long, free-form jam sessions into cohesive songs, linking forward and reversed bits of tape and noise without keeping detailed notes. He just sort of “did it."

Conny died young, at 47 in 1987, of cancer. His console is now in England, still making records for artists like Franz Ferdinand. The Motorik goes on!

Some Things to Hear

Here’s a curated list of some things Krautrock and Conny Plank.

This is a wonderful extension to everything I’ve written above, going into a bit more detail on the recordings and linked to listening examples.

https://thevinylfactory.com/features/10-essential-conny-plank-records/

Can - this is out there stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dZbAFmnRVA

Kraftwork - the Beatles of Krautrock. They’re still around. The album Autobahn was the last record they did that was engineered by Plank as they became more successful and ever more electronic. Here’s a playlist of vids. Great background music. Occasionally look up and see Germans dressed as robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQIYEPe6DWY&list=RDEMlS0N2Gz3BIH0JY8Cyyrimw&start_radio=1

Neu! - Loose, jam-oriented stuff. The recording below is an 8-track, engineered by Conny Plank. The drums here can’t be on more than two tracks, but there’s astonishing clarity and stereo perspective on everything. My guess is he did this with just two mics in exactly the right place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndpi8tNZyQ&list=RDzndpi8tNZyQ&start_radio=1

Niagara - who says a percussion-only album can’t be amazing? Breathtaking engineering by Conny Plank, and amazing playing by a bunch of killer drummers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T5R4nFIBgg

La Düsseldorf - a spinoff comprised of members of Kraftwork and Neu! Industrial before industrial?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz9q9UZS4M0&list=PL4384B64D44A0F11C

Cluster - electronic and minimal, occasionally with Brian Eno.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l50cmJOiHv0&list=OLAK5uy_kNoI0SQPzDD4EFa5MY1gKk-dOyd202orU

Tangerine Dream - dramatic electronic Krautrock, or the basis of every sci-fi movie soundtrack since 1980.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdFHE73aOMI&list=RDEMflsAy-eLxQ2-oszlwebZ4g&start_radio=1

Faust - Krautrock as noise. Or punk ska. I have no idea what this stuff is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=menuXx3oq80&list=OLAK5uy_lJ5UzdPN6Dj1C7D3oYhQDSc_6Zjc3KgPI

Not Krautrock, but Conny Plank...

Eurythmics - Belinda. Recorded by Conny Plank. This is when the band was way more rock.

Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports This is the record that started ambient music. Plank was very much involved.

Ultravox - Vienna A huge early new wave hit. High romance and electronic noise, Conny Plank at the faders.

Devo - Q: Are we not men? A: We are Devo. Produced by Eno, engineered by Plank. Insane stuff.

Scorpions - Love Drive. Conny Plank and early metal. Great sounds overall.

A Percussion Recording Tip

I used to use a stereo tube mic most often, but when I was dealing with a percussionist who was playing a lot of different things all over the place, like congas, and then some bell tree thing, and then a rik, and then a talking drum, and on and on, it became impossible to mic all of it with a pair and get good capture, or mic things individually and not get tons of phase issues.

The solution was a t-shirt and a PZM.

A PZM is a flat plate of a mic that has a semi-hemispherical pattern — it picks up everything across 180 degrees. Not a cheap mic, they were originally made by Crown and were like $800 each. However, you could get a Crown PZM for $60 if you went to Radioshack, because the Realistic PZM was in fact a Crown mic. For $120 you could get a pair of great-sounding, albeit unbalanced wreck-around mics.

SO... I taped a PZM to the center of a t-shirt with gaffers tape and had the percussionist put the shirt on, the mic facing out from his chest, perfectly positioned for percussion pick-up. Since he was naturally balancing levels as he moved from instrument to instrument, I didn’t even have to ride gain. For the mix, I’d split the one track to a bunch of channels and then automate them with whatever EQ or effects were needed to get the best sound out of that particular bit of percussion. When dealing with expensive studio musicians, producers often wanted me to go fast with them in the studio and then work more on the mix because, well, my time was cheaper!

Thanks for coming down the rabbit hole. Tchüss til next week!

Happy Monday,

I'm still experimenting with the format. That might never change, and it probably shouldn't.

(If you're creative and not experimenting then somethings wrong).

All the links are now tucked into paragraphs, and people asked if the musical examples could start at exactly what I'm writing about, so I did that as well.

I really appreciate all your comments and ideas. Please feel free to write and suggest. New Monday is here to inspire you and open ears and minds to possibilities, mine included.

I think it is best we start off with a song today. Something mellow and sort of sad, like Memorial Day in the US, so have a listen to Paper Tiger by Beck. This is a great recording and performance. And we will chat about it lower down the newsletter...

Developing Plug-ins: the Dan Method

We get asked a fair amount about how we develop plug-ins and why our plug-ins are the way they are. A lot of what we're about is revealed in this blog post Dan wrote about how he developed the Talkback Limiter. Did you know the TBL started as a DIY project with circuit boards, resistors and wires, etc.?

Minimal Drum Micing and Drum Tuning

Drum recording has evolved from letting them bleed into the vocal mic to over and under micing every piece of the kit... and then replacing everything with samples.

The Glyn Johns Micing Technique keeps popping up. It's not really a fixed technique as much as it's an approach, and Glyn Johns himself kept evolving and changing it.

In a nutshell, it's a mic on the kick, and then two overheads, one basically over the snare, the other somewhere near the floor tom. Often, though, extra mics were tossed in there as needed, depending on what was lacking.

You've heard this sound a lot — The Rolling Stones from Beggars Banquet to Exile on Mainstreet, the first Led Zeppelin album, and on and on. It's the sound of the early 70s.

I stumbled across a really excellent video on the Glyn Johns thing, and on minimal drum micing in general. But what's really good about this video is how Joel from DrumsDotPizza ties drum tuning into the whole picture.

Tuning is not just a way to make the drums sound good, but getting them pitched correctly changes how they're picked up by mics. This guy gives away a lot of good information that applies to all drum recording, not just when you're being minimal about it. This is the most valuable thing in this week's New Monday.

Stealing Ideas and Influences

Back to Paper Tiger...

This song has been on my mind since I first heard it. I love the sounds, and the orchestration. I originally pulled it into this newsletter because it seems to be a pretty good example of minimal drum micing, but I would bet it was tight mic'd as well. Whatever, a dandy fine drum sound. But there's more...

Steal this:

There's wonderful interplay between the guitar on the right channel and the string section on the left—it sounds like they're soloing off each other, and I was wondering how the hell they pulled this off. Turns out Beck sang the string part, and then his father arranged it. This is a very stealable idea.

The theft, or inspiration, gets worse. Or better?

Paper Tiger, and Beck's Sea Change album from which it came, are influenced heavily by a 1971 album called Histoire de Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg.

Histoire de Melody Nelson

Gainsbourg is... beyond France's Bob Dylan? Culturally, in France, he's a HUGE deal.

Histoire de Melody Nelson is a concept album about a middle aged man hitting a 14 year old English girl with his car and then seducing her. And then she's killed in a plane crash. I kid you not. Needless to say, thematically, this wouldn't float at all today. It was controversial when it came out.

But the album was a tremendous critical success, and very influential. It featured very close mic'd vocals, a bass and drum driven funk groove, psychedelic guitar parts, and wonderful strings by arranger Jean-Claude Vannier. Have a listen to the first track from it, Melody.

See where Beck got Paper Tiger?

But not only Beck. There's also this recording by Goldfrapp. It's much tighter playing, but those string parts seem awfully familiar, as does the whole vibe.

Not sure you can hear it, but the chorus is a V - IV progression that we talked about a few weeks ago.

And more. Here's a song off Melody Nelson with a distinctive acoustic guitar part...

Note this highly very extremely similar guitar part on this song by French electronica pioneers AIR.

J'adore AIR, and their entire career seems based on mixing Melody Nelson with certain songs off Dark Side of the Moon... like this song Highschool Lover. Sounds a lot like Breathe (in the air), doesn't it? Just add the bass and strings from Melody Nelson.

And there are of course, more people who dipped into the Melody Nelson pool. Portishead. Jarvis Cocker. Placebo. Michael Stipe. The list goes on...

Is it an influence? Is it stealing?

Is it something that actually matters? It doesn't seem to.

Be influenced. Pick ideas like flowers and put them in your garden and let things grow.

Now get out there and borrow!

Warm regards,
The guys at Korneff

 

Happy Monday!

Steve Albini died last week at 61. He was a superb audio engineer and by most accounts, a lovely person.

He was outspoken and had no time for stupidity or unscrupulous behavior. Needless to say, he had a negative opinion of the music industry.

He loved music, loved musicians, loved rock, and loved doing his work, which was engineering. Although he is called a producer by some, he thought “producer” was a dirty word and an exploitative job. He was an engineer, damnit.

He was a huge influence on recording, especially in the 90s.

Here’s a compilation I made of some of the more interesting and useful videos and articles covering various aspects of this complex man. Lot’s of How To stuff, but also some of it is pretty funny.

Start Here

If you’re unfamiliar with Steve Albini, start here, with this video of him with Anthony Bourdain!

Albini was smart and a nerd about everything - he’s even nerdy about the sandwich.

Engineering

Must read article on engineering - Great article - he covers literally everything he does in the studio. You’ll learn a ton from this.

Video: Steve on the Job and Equipment - More good info and ideas.

Mr Albini always had a very well thought-out approach to everything he did, and of course especially to recording. I’ve selected a few clips for you all that illustrate his thinking, and also are useful for you developing your thinking.

Techniques

On tuning drums

Phase when mic’ing drum sets - he’s talking a lot about absolute phase here.

Mic’ing Snare Drums

How to Clean a Console and Outboard - this is REALLY useful

How to Mic a Speaker Cabinet - man, he goes into depth and is an excellent teacher.

Gear

Mr Albini had an interesting taste in equipment. Here are some links to some of the stuff you see in these videos or that get mentioned in articles.

Neotek was a Chicago-based maker of recording consoles. They went out of business, were taken over by a company called Sytek (which was actually formed by former Neotek employees). Sytek too is now out of business.

Neotek Elite II Consoles

Sytek MPX-4 preamps are spectacular. Incredibly clean with super fast response. They pop up on eBay and Reverb from time to time. Performance up there with an API.

Those strange looking black speakers on the bridge of the console I know quite well: B&W 805v’s. Wonderful speakers with a very sophisticated internal design. The 800 Series of speakers had a sort of honeycomb internal bracing system that resulted in an almost non-resonant cabinet.

The Really Nice Compressor - awesome and cheap.

On Business and Relationship

Advice for bands

The Adventures of Steve Albini

Above all, we lost a good human being who lived life well. Rest in Peace, Mr. Albini.

Steve Albini does his George Martin (the Beatles Producer) impression.

Albini and friends on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend
They prank Gene Simmons... this is really funny!

Steve on speaking Italian

Steve interviewed by a cat

Steve gets philosophical?

Take care of yourselves.

Warm regards,
The guys at Korneff

Happy Monday!

We hope you’re on the receiving end of some good karma. We at Korneff are, and we hope it spreads to you all.

KARMA POLICE

What a great song. I remember hearing the original when Radiohead was ruling the alternative airwaves in the late 1990s. A simple pop tune taken up a notch with wonderful production and a grinding to a halt sort of ending.

Listen to Radiohead’s Karma Police here.

You might have heard a recent cover version of it by Pierce the Veil, recorded by none other than... our Dan Korneff.

Listen to Pierce the Veil's Karma Police here.

Another killer production, huge and heavy but with a lot of the flavor of the original.

Karma Police Drums

We’ve got two blog articles for you, one for the Radiohead original, the other for the Pierce the Veil cover version. Both articles focus on the drum recording techniques involved, and each article has ideas and techniques that you can use.

Read Radiohead Karma Police post

Read Pierce the Veil Karma Police post

Back Issues, New Format

This little newsletter has been growing and people keep asking to see previous letters. So...

Click here to see back issues

We are still experimenting with the format. We’re thinking of featuring a different picture at the top each week. We’d like to show a picture of a studio with a coffee cup, so there is a nice Monday morning work vibe. We’d like to feature pictures of YOUR beautiful studio. And we think ALL studios are beautiful. So, please, send us a picture of your studio with a coffee cup in it, and we’ll see if we can make this work.

Have a great week.

Warm regards,
The guys at Korneff

Recently, I had the incredible opportunity to record a cover of "Karma Police" with the band Pierce the Veil at Signature Sound Studio in San Diego.

As an audio engineer, capturing the perfect drum sound is not only a pivotal part of creating a track that resonates, but it was also one of the highlights of the original song that influenced the overall vibe of the song. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at the recording techniques we used to achieve this dynamic and impactful drum sound.

Our session took place in Studio A, renowned for its fully loaded 32-channel API 1608 console and a spacious live room measuring 31′ x 27′ with a 17′ ceiling. The old '80s recording studio aesthetic of faux brick walls and an old parquet floor not only set the mood but also provided the perfect room acoustic properties for this track. Navigating a new room can be a challenge, but with the assistance of award-winning engineer and mixer, Christian Cummings, we were up and running in no time. His knowledge of the room was invaluable, guiding me on the best placement for the drum kit in the live room to exploit its natural reverb and warm characteristics.

The essence of "Karma Police" demanded a layered approach to capturing drum sounds, targeting three types of ambiance: close, mid, and far. I wanted to make sure each part of the drum kit could shine through in the mix, not only providing depth but also a sense of space. A basic assortment of microphones was used for close miking positions. Carefully placed gobos and an area rug helped keep the close mics dry. Instead of close miking the cymbals, I opted for an "overall" drum sound using a pair of Bock 251 overheads. They were placed slightly higher than usual to take advantage of Lonnie's consistent drumming, which practically pre-mixed the drum sound with his performance. For the mid ambiance, Coles 4038 ribbon mics were positioned about six feet in front of the kit in a spaced pair configuration. These microphones offer a smooth, warm sound and have the ability to capture high-frequency detail without harshness. This is what I built the entire drum sound around. All of the close mics needed to reinforce the room mics, especially the Coles. For the expansive room sound needed for the song's explosive ending, Beyer M88 mics were placed about 15 feet back in an XY configuration.

The API console did a wonderful job of making the drums punchy and full, but the overall vibe was missing a little bit of that "magic." I knew exactly what it needed; a little love from the El Juan Limiter. Giving the Coles a healthy dose of limiting, along with input shape set to Punchy, really brought them to life. A nice lift in the bottom end from the Tone Shaping finished it off nicely by adding a satisfying heft to the entire kit. Everyone was like "damn, these drums sound sick". The prototype for Puff Puff mixPass also made an appearance on guitars and bass, but that's for another story.

A lesson I've learned early in my career is to commit your sounds to 'tape' during the recording stage. Why wait until the mixing phase? We printed the room sounds through the El Juan Limiter, ensuring that the drum sound we fell in love with was captured exactly as we wanted, forever.

Recording at Signature Sound with Pierce the Veil was not just about utilizing the studio's top-tier equipment; it was about creating an environment where technology meets creativity to capture a sound that truly stands out. This session was a testament to the power of experience, technique, and a little bit of studio magic.

Dan recently worked on Pierce the Veil’s latest release Karma Police, their cover of a modern classic. We have an article about that here.

We thought it would be interesting to take a quick look at the original Karma Police.

Radiohead has always managed to combine a penchant for noise and experimentation with a surprising pop sensibility. Thom Yorke and Co. make interesting and catchy weird records. When The Bends came out in 1995, it was being played in every control room that was setting up for a rock session. A great record, and to my mind a better offering than OK Computer, which followed in 1997.

OK Computer was amazing sonically. More experimental than The Bends, OK Computer was a prickly, challenging listen. The big single on it was Karma Police, and it’s one of the more restrained recordings on OK Computer. It’s “Beatle-esque,” with harmony vocals, a bass drum combo that sounds and feels like Paul and Ringo, and a piano part in the chorus that’s a sweet bite of Sexie Sadie off The White Album.

The vocal performance... this too is a Beatle thing. John Lennon often used to record vocals very close to the mic and sing very quietly. The same thing is happening on Karma Police — the chorus is practically whispered, and it’s not until the vamp out at the end that Mr Yorke opens up and sings with a bit more power.

Quick idea to steal: The vocal on the vamp out has reverb on it, and the ‘verb itself has some additional effects on it. Love this idea - don’t effect the vocal, keep it clean and effect the effect.

I found two demo versions of Karma Police... and of course I ran them through the Puff Puff mixPass and the El Juan!

This first cut sounds like vocals, a guitar, and drums working in a rehearsal space. The song has a different structure and lyrics and it sounds like a very early workout of the tune.

This version is Thom Yorke singing with an acoustic guitar, and the song is basically all there — he’s even figured out the ending vamp.

Enough demos, let’s talk about the drums on the original recording.

Three Overheads = HUGE

Producer/engineer Nigel Godrich worked with Radiohead on Karma Police, and he tended to mic them using a spaced pair of overheads with a third mic right in the middle of the kit as well. Three Overheads.

Here’s a picture of drummer Phil Selway during Ok Computer sessions. They recorded in a mansion in England (actress Jane Seymour’s house), with big rooms, high ceilings and lots of stone and glass. Very reflective spaces.

The kit is mic’d with a spaced pair of what look to be vintage AKG C-12s and a Neumann M-49 in the middle. There are also some close mics on the toms.

 

Throw some compression on it and there you are: insta huge. Of course, there will be phase issues galore, but oh man! Crush that center mic with a limiter and you’ll get a heck of a huge drum sound.

The overheads to the left and right provide a little bit of left-right movement, and the mic and center pins the whole thing down. And that is the sound of Karma Police 1997. A simple, clever set-up.

What are the sheets or drapes around the kit doing? Not a whole hell of a lot. Probably just getting some of the high-end shizz off of things, but mid to lows is going through them like a rhino through a petunia patch.

VERY IMPORTANT: notice how they took pieces off the kit. One crash cymbal. No ride cymbal. One rack tom. This is a SUPER TIP.

Remember, toms and all drums resonate, and cymbals are highly reflective — they’re big metal plates. Want to clean up a drum set for a good sound? Take all the extraneous stuff off of it. If it’s not getting hit during that session, it shouldn’t be on the drum set.

This mic setup is similar to late 1960s early 70s drum setups, like the "Glynn Johns setup."

Glynn Johns = super influential engineer/producer.

His setup = A mic on the kick, another mic sort of low to the floor tom, and then a third mic somewhat higher and over the snare, but, and this is a BIG BUT, those last two mics have to be equidistant from the snare to keep the snare in phase.

This is the basic sound of Led Zeppelin, the Stones, the Who, etc.

People like to experiment with the Glyn Johns setup but it is hard to get a modern sound from it. First of all, Glyn was typically recording with great players in great spaces, and everything is easier when you have someone like John Bonham on the drum and you’re in the great hall of a mansion. Also, there wasn’t the fastidiousness that modern audio recording seems to wallow in. There was a time when being slightly flat was ok. Ahhh... the good old days.

Often, the Glyn Johns setup has to be augmented with more mics, because the hi-hat and snare are out of balance, the rack tom sounds thin, etc. Eventually, this method becomes basically multi-micing the drum set.

If you try this and you’re using two different mics for the overheads, remember to measure from where the diaphragm is and not from where the grill cover is, so you’ll cheat that measurement a bit. The times I tried (and then subsequently abandoned the Glyn Johns setup) I used a piece of string to get the distances right. You can also use a mic cable. I’ve seen people use tape measures and I think that’s ridiculous. Dude, it’s a drum set with gaffer tape all over it: we’re hitting it with sticks. We’re not trying to calculate the radar return of a stealth fighter.

Back to the Radiohead track, this is a lovely, huge drum sound and the technique used to get it would translate to virtually any room—even a cruddy sounding space in a basement.

As always, we love hearing from you all, we love hearing your thoughts and ideas.

I have no idea who this kid is, but I'd love to have him as the drummer on a session.

Here's the vid:

He's got so many things that I look for in a drummer:

1) He's got taste. 18, playing for parents and has got girls all around him? I would have TOTALLY been overplaying and showing off if I was him. Thank God I'm an old guitarist and not in Cleveland, screwing these kids up by playing too much, adding fills everywhere, etc. This kid does what the song and performance needs. This sort of taste is really hard to teach, and he just has it.

2) He keeps good time. He's definitely not dragging, and I don't hear his tempo swaying. He is pushing on some sections of the song and pulling back on others, but that is what you want. Time should be a bit elastic and stretch and contract for the needs of the song.

3) He's solid. By this, I mean he makes the time very clear to the other band members, and that makes it easier for them to play well. A good drummer tightens the band up. Other members play better because they don't have to worry about the time and can concentrate on what they're doing. Case in point: the song has a solo bass part at the top, and listen how authoritative and locked in that bass part gets the moment the drummer kicks in.

4) He's articulate and crisp. This is a pretty bad recording, but you can hear what this guy is doing and you can see it. He's not mushy. He hits hard, he hits right but without a lot of extra movement. His arms aren't flailing everywhere. He's relaxed, precise and clean. He would be a delight to record.

5) He listens and adapts. At 1:21 the whole group does a free form kind of wind-up, and the tempo vanishes, and then at the end of it the whole band hits the landing like Simone Byles. And then it all kicks in again. The drummer listens to where everyone is going, adapts, and then re-establishes the beat perfectly. Excellent playing.

The member of the band that gets kicked out the most is the drummer. When I was producing, bands were always saying, "We're interviewing a drummer. What should we ask him?"

My number one question to ask is: "What do you think of Ringo?"

If a drummer appreciates what Ringo was all about in the Beatles, that's a definite green flag. If a drummer hates him... run away. Chances are the player hasn't matured enough to play for the song, and for the rest of the band, and sees songs as carrier waves for fills, and performances are dead air until the drum solo.

The kid from the Cleveland School of Rock in 2018: he's a keeper.

This guy keeps coming up in things I write and in my thinking about production. He's probably a bigger influence on me than I give him credit for.

I wasn't really a Doors fan. In high school there was a brief phase where a Jim Morrison bio came out and everything was The Doors, The Doors, The Doors, but really, we were 10th graders just hoping to hear the long version of 'Light My Fire' on the radio. Nowadays I prefer to hear the short version on the radio. But 'The End' was cool, the whole 'Morrison Hotel/Hard Rock Cafe' album was good, and 'LA Woman' was a great song to drive to - still is.

The whole album is great, and a perfect listen for a grey Sunday.

One thing I always thought was great on Doors records was the drumming and the drum sounds. In terms of recordings in the mid 1960's, which band had better, and by that I mean more modern, drum sounds than The Doors? Maybe some of the Beatles stuff? Certainly not Cream - they totally lost Ginger Baker in those recordings. The Who? Nope. The Stones? Nope.

The Doors records always had a great, natural snare sound, beautifully recording cymbals with tons of articulation, and HUGE tom sounds. I still think The Doors drum sounds stack up against just about anything, and given the time, they're remarkable.

Bruce Botnick Rules!

The Doors records were all engineered by a guy named Bruce Botnick, and it's a pity his name isn't tossed around in audio circles with the same reverence as Al Schmitt's or Bruce Swedien's. His discography is amazing, stretching way beyond The Doors, out into film mixing, and a bunch of hit records for Eddie Money. He did a fantastic record for the band Love when he was 22 years old — he was a wunderkind. Look him up. He's a monster.

The Doors basically cut their albums live in Sunset Studios, initially to four track and then eight track. Their last album, 'LA Woman', was recorded in their basement rehearsal space, rather than a studio, at Bruce Botnick's suggestion. He set up a control room in their business office and ran mic cables and a talkback system down the stairs. 'LA Woman' sounds great. Hard to believe anyone could get such a clear, powerful recording out of a basement, maybe 8 mics and two or three compressors.

Botnick's recording set-up for Densmore's drums was usually mono, using very few microphones. He would put a condenser roughly at Densmore's head level but over the kit, and another one under the snare, flipping the phase of that—he would have had to adjust these two mics a lot to minimize phase shifts. Single dynamic mic on the kick. This is about the same as Glyn Johns' drum setup at about the same time. There are pictures of Densmore in the studio, with an additional mic or two on the kit, but really, it's just three mics in roughly the configuration described.

Densmore took off the bottom heads and NEVER changed skins (heads). I mean NEVER.

Of course, most of the sound of the drums on a Doors recording is the way Densmore played. He was really a jazzer at heart, and you can hear this in his amazing cymbal work and in the economy of his fills. He's also very interesting and inventive as a player. Bear in mind, most of these recordings were banged out, everyone playing at once, a vocal cut live as well, the whole band listening to each other and basically arranging things on the spot. They were a much better bunch of players than they get credit for, and Jim Morrison a much more capable singer than what is suggested by his reputation.

LA Woman

So, 'LA Woman': The Doors are cutting basically a live blues album in a basement with two extra players, guitarist Marc Benno and bassist Jerry Scheff. They did 10 sessions across about seven days (unbelievable pace - these days just the damn drums take a month), cutting songs in five or six takes. Who records like this these days???

There's a lot of things to hear in Densmore's playing.

He follows the singer. Listen to his fills and you'll notice he's always working around the singer. Actually, scratch that: he's always following whatever instrument is leading the track at that moment. If it's vocals, he's doing something around the vocals; if it's a guitar run or a keyboard flourish, he works off of that. There's a wonderful sense of "handing off" in The Doors' musical arrangement.

Think of "The Gate"

I think of the different sections of a song as being separated by a fence with a gate. So, there's a verse butted up against a chorus, and separating the two is this narrow gate. How the band proceeds through that gate is a huge part of arranging. Sometimes all the instruments walk through the gate together (all playing the same thing) and sometimes one instrument goes through—a guitar lick—and then the rest follow. And with shitty bands, everyone just sort of slams through the gate in a big fucking catastrophe.

Bands that arrange well and listen to each other well, like The Doors, sort of line-up and go through the gate one after the other, no one stepping on someone else's feet, nothing clumsy, everything clean and interesting. And you hear this all over 'LA Woman', where one idea follows another, follows another, and you can literally hear the "handing off" of the attention, the position, as they move through the gate.

Wacky sort of explanation, but listen for it, and of course, try to apply it to your own work.

Finally, Densmore plays with a sense of where he is in the song and where the song is heading to. 'LA Woman', one of the greatest driving songs ever recorded, is a good example of this. Densmore's playing is slightly different at any point in the record. Not only can you listen to just the drums and know, "Ok, this is a verse," you can listen and hear that it's the second verse. There's something slightly different about the playing. It's hard to describe but easy to hear, I think. Densmore also, somehow, plays in such a way that you know the song is in its final stages, that it's ending. Somehow the rhythm is triumphant, or slightly looser. The ending of 'LA Woman' has always sounded triumphant to me. There's a musical narrative to that song. It starts tight and almost "careful," falls apart into drunkenness in the breakdown, the bridge, then somehow finds its way out of that mess and into the sun and new hope, as the band goes speeding off into the sunset down Sunset Boulevard, and out onto the highway. It simply feels great.

Ok. Enough of me. Have a listen to 'LA Woman' while driving. Don't blame me for the speeding ticket.

I think things will get a bit more concrete in the next few weeks. I'll give you some ideas that are more ready to use and are less artsie fartsie. As always, I appreciate all your comments. They make me think, and thinking is good.

The other day on our Discord channel, Dan Korneff shared a snare drum trick that uses the Korneff Audio Micro Digital Reverberator.

Dan is well-known for his hard hitting, articulate drum and snare sounds. Not many producers/engineers have snare sounds that are considered iconic, but Dan does—search "Paramore Riot snare” on Gearspace - multiple threads come up.

His MDR snare trick is easy and gives you a lot of control over the size of the snare and how it sits in the stereo field.

What you're going to do is set up two different MDRs. One we’ll call the Fatter, the other we’ll call the Wider. Together, they’ll make your snare fatter and wider. Think of it as drinking beer and sitting around with no exercise all day for the snare.

Make the Snare Fatter

Start by dropping a Micro Digital Reverberator instance on the snare channel, or on the snare bus if you are combining multiple snare sources together. Do this by placing the MDR in an insert location, after any other processing on the channel.

Switch the MDR over to Machine 2, and bring up program 03 Small Bright 0.3 Sec. Set DRY all the way to the right, and bring down WET to around 2:00. You want to pass all of the snare through the MDR, and then add the effect back in.

03 Small Bright 0.3 Sec has a timbre similar to that of a tight drum booth or a small, highly reflective room. The very short time of this patch means that it will sound more like a doubling than a discrete reverb. It will thicken the snare up and make it last a little longer.

Press the Korneff nameplate to switch the MDR to the back side so you can tweak the circuit. Locate the blue trimpot to the left—it’s labeled WIDTH. Turn this all the way counterclockwise to 0%. This will make the the wet signal mono, so even if you’ve got a stereo snare track (for some reason), the effect will be confined tightly. This reinforces the snare’s solidity in the sound field.

Make the Snare Wider

To widen out the ambience of the snare, you’re going to set up another instance of the MDR, only rather than using it via a channel insert, you’re going to feed it via an effects send.

Set up a new send on the channel and turn it up to 50% for starters. Find the return, and put the MDR into an insert slot on it. The MDR instance will load and the DRY should be all the way to the left (fully counterclockwise) and the WET should be all the way to the right (fully clockwise). You don’t want any dry signal in an effects return.

A fresh instance on the MDR will come up set to Machine 1, program Large 1. This is not a coincidence—the plug-in’s default is the patch Dan uses the most, and it’s perfect for this application. Large 1 is dark and has a decay time of around .6 seconds and sounds like a big studio live room that has been damped down to control flutter and ring. It has a noticeable slap to it. To my ear, it has a “cannon" sort of effect on a snare.

Flip around to the back of the MDR and set the WIDTH trimpot to 100%. We want this as wide as possible to wrap that ambience around us a bit.

Adjust Adjust Adjust!

Depending on the genre of music and the density of your mix, you’ll have to adjust the settings a bit, and this is where the PRE-DELAY control on the front comes in really handy.

PRE-DELAY delays the onset of the effect. At low settings it is hard to hear, and as you turn it up you’ll increase the separation between the dry signal and the wet signal. Below 40ms, the dry and the wet will sound cohesive, but once you get higher than 40ms, the two signals will separate and your ear will hear them as two clearly different events. Very high settings will give a slapjack like effect and start to add an additional rhythmic component to your mix. You may or may not want that.

On the Fatter MDR, the one set to Machine 2,, as you adjust the PRE-DELAY the sound of the snare will brighten. Turn up the WET control to increase the size of the snare. To my ear, turning up WET seems to increase how hard the drummer is hitting. Seriously, even if you’re not using the wider portion of this trick, it’s a good thing to slap an MDR with this patch on your snare always. In a weird way it is doing the work of both a compressor and an EQ but in a much subtler way.

PRE-DELAY and the level of the return on the Wider MDR (the one set to Machine 1), has a lot of effect on the location of the snare from front to back in your stereo space. By messing with level and PRE-DLAY you can “move” the snare back or forward in relation to the rest of the drum set. Too much effect can make the snare sound like it was recorded in a completely different space than the other drums, and this might be an effect you’re going for. I usually want my drums to sound integrated and cohesive, so I’ll set Wider so that snare plays nicely with the rest of the mix.

Feel free to use different programs on the MDR and experiment a bit. In general, though, the trick works best with smaller spaces on the Fatter, and larger spaces on the Wider.

Some Extra Ideas

I usually feed a little of the hi-hat into the Wider using the effects send. Huge, distant snares with small, dry hi-hats sound goofy to me. I like these two instruments appearing like they at least know each other and not like they’re meeting each other for the first time on a Tinder date.

You might want to think about automating the Wider return. In general, you should be automating your reverb returns, almost “riding” them like any other instrument in your mix. In spots where you want the snare to be prominent, ride the return up, in places where things need to be tightened and tucked in a bit, pull the return down. I especially like bringing reverbs up during fade-outs, so it sounds like the song is fading away into space rather than simply getting quieter.

See You On Discord

This blog was inspired by a question that came up on our Discord channel. Thanks to Mistawalk! Dan and I monitor our Discord, and we definitely answer questions and give out ideas and tricks all the time on it, so hit up our Discord. And our Facebook. We’ll help you out however we can.

Truth be told, the first concert I ever experienced was Vanilla Ice at the ripe age of 11.

It was a Philadelphia 76ers halftime show in 1989, thanks to a raffle my mother won at work. At this point in time, I hadn’t formulated a musical opinion of my own. I was subject to whatever my parents would listen to in the car. My mom would usually dominate the radio, and I enjoyed what I heard. Richard Marx, Simply Red, Billy Joel, Gloria Estefan, Debbie Gibson… All the hits. I could appreciate the melody, and sing along to all the songs. As fun as that was, it didn’t really hit that sweet spot with me, musically speaking. My dad had been jamming this album Hold Your Fire by RUSH for about 2 years non stop. It wasn’t happy like all the other music my mom was listening to. There were these HUGE synths and drums. It was weird and dark. So close to what I was looking for.

A few months later, my brother gets this new thing called a CD player. They have been around for a couple years at this point, but didn’t really take off until “anti skip” technology was developed in 1990. The first album he got was the brand new Megadeth release, Rust In Peace. It just so happened that they were on tour and coming to Philly, so my brother asked if we could go.

ENTER: my first real concert experience. The tour was called Clash of the Titans. I wasn’t really sure what I was in for, but I agreed to go cause I had heard some songs from the opening band, Alice in Chains. The venue was The Spectrum in Philly, the same place as the Vanilla Ice concert. The arena was nice enough to set up folding chairs for the concert goers on the main floor to sit in (yes, you read that correctly). Luckily, we were nestled safely in the nose bleed section. Alice in Chains really rocked. Who doesn’t like the song Man in the Box?? Apparently, the people with the Slayer shirts next to me. They didn’t. I heard all sorts of funny comments being screamed at the band, like “isn’t it past your bed time?” and “time for a diaper change!”. I dunno… they were pretty good to me. Next up was Anthrax. Not my cup of tea. I don’t think my brother or dad liked it either, cause we spent the whole set getting hot dogs and using the rest room. The restroom at a metal concert, when you’re 12 years old, can be a traumatizing experience. I had never seen someone shit in a sink before. There were no urinals. Just a big tub that people were pissing in. Jjjeezzzzusss…

We got back just in time for Megadeth to hit the stage. As the set started, I felt a tap on my shoulder. There was an elderly couple sitting behind me. They were easily in their 70’s! The lady says “that’s my grandson” pointing to Nick Menza (RIP). Their set was quite enjoyable. I had recognized some of the songs from my brother. I remember they played the song Dawn Patrol. It’s just drums and bass. I was like “you can do that?” Mind blown. Hangar 18 sealed the deal for me. I was a fan.

I don’t think I ever gave by brother back his CD after I saw this show!

After they were done, there was one band left… Slayer. I never herd them before, and it would be pretty hard to top what I had just seen. The lights dimmed. The crowd screamed. The set opened with a song called Hell Awaits. Those thoughtfully placed folding chairs took flight and the floor turned into a no-holds-barred WWE match. People were suffering severe trauma. Those chairs got piled up in the back of the floor area and were promptly set on fire. People started fighting. Punching. Kicking. After the show, I had learned that they were doing a dance called “Mosh”. Who knew??

My jaw dropped. The sound this band was making. I had never heard anything like it in my life! It was….. it was… god awful! I couldn’t understand WHY a band would take perfectly good instruments and make songs like that. We suffered thru 6 songs. By the time they played Jesus Saves, we had enough. Time to leave. We didn’t like the music, and my dad was happy to leave early and beat the traffic. That’s such a dad thing to do.

About a week later, my brother gets a new CD. Seasons in the Abyss, by that god awful band Slayer that we just skipped out on. After a couple listens, my opinion started to change. My hatred for something I didn’t understand turned into a curiosity. What I previously heard as “noise” turned into an intricate musical composition. Since that day, Slayer has been one of my favorite bands ever. It made me realize something important. Music that I understood and enjoyed from first listen is also the same music that I grew tired of quickly. The music that I didn’t understand at first, and took a while to get, ended up being the musical experience that lived with me forever.

A couple months later, Metallica released their self titled album, I got my first Tama drum kit, and my life changed forever. You never really know how long music has been a part of your life. It’s just always there. Thanks to a post from my friend Mark Lewis, I now know that my musical Independence started 30 years ago today.

Drum bus compression has really become a "thing." Hit an online forum like Gearslutz and there's tens of thousands of posts and just as many opinions on which hardware or plugin to use, what settings, VCA vs. FET, SSL or API and on and on and on. People drop thousands on a vintage ADR Compex, and it sits idle in the rack until mixdown, and then it does the only thing it will do on the record: squash the drum bus. It's ridiculous.

But it's also really cool. Ridiculous and yet really cool: that's audio engineering. $18k on a vocal mic, and then turn the track into Cheez-wiz by running it through Auto Tune so it sounds like someone wired up a baby duck to a sequencer? Excellent!

I love this stuff so much. So silly. So cool. Sigh.

Anyway.

Get the drum bus compression right and the kit kicks ass. Do it badly, and the whole record sounds like ass. The following is a combination of history, opinion, things to listen to, some production ideas and WTF. Here we go.

My Virgin Bus Compression Experience

Of course, if you solo'd out the 1176's channel it sounded just awful. Like your mom is Lars Ulrich in drag and yelling at you.

First time I saw someone bus compress the drums was in the mid-eighties in NYC at some studio (Sorcerer?). I was a dumb kid at the time who wanted to be helpful but mainly was the fastest mic cable coiler in the world. The engineer had a mix going. He assigned the kick, snare and the overheads to a bus, patched that into a lone UREI 1176 that looked like it spent a long weekend with Madonna , and then routed that back into the console in mono, panned down the center. First time I ever saw Parallel Compression. Then he pressed down all four ratio buttons of the 1176 (first time I saw that, too), cranked up the input, pinning the gain reduction meter, and brought it up in the mix slowly until suddenly the drums were THERE, you know? BOOM! Instant awesome.

Of course, if you solo'd out the 1176's channel it sounded just awful. Like your mom is Lars Ulrich in drag and yelling at you. Whatever. But in the mix, it was sublime.

I don’t remember the song or the group, but the sound was very similar to Don’t Fear the Reaper, and I suspect that there’s an 1176 with drums down the center of this recording (in addition to more cowbell). I had a chat with the drummer, Albert Bouchard, about this years ago, and he said some things to indicate this was the case.  If you listen, the drums are strangely mono, and especially in the middle break, when he plays a fast hi-hat figure, it sounds like the pumping of an 1176 to me.

What is with the 70's???

A mermaid gasping for air after you accidentally harpooned her sort of thing going on.

The 70's either have the greatest drum sounds or the absolute worst, depending on your viewpoint and whether or not you like your drums sounds huge and roomy or dull and reminiscent of someone hitting a couch with a broom.

The '70's dead room thing is all over records from California in the 1970's. There are some great songs, but the drums are noise gated and recorded in a dead little drum booth. And while the song is amazing, the drums on Life's Been Good...?

Dead drums are probably more about the advent of noise gates as a viable technology in the early 70’s than anything else. The industry tends to adopt a trend, milk the hell out of it, and then abandon it for whatever cool thing comes next.

One band never succumbed to the whole dry drum thing, and that's Led Zeppelin. Those guys always recorded drums in live rooms with minimal mics, and those sounds have stood the test of time. The archetypal track is When The Levee Breaks - good lord, what a drum sound!

Early Zep records were recorded in houses and other non-studio situations. The console used was typically a Helios, which were amazing, mainly custom made. Only 50 were ever built. When the Levee Breaks is an 8 track recording, so the drum "bus" compression is really a drum track compression: stereo drums squashed through a Helios board compressor. Or not! Helios compressors were made by ADR, so what is happening there is bus compression through an ADR Compex, which, like the 1176, uses an FET. Seeing a pattern?

The Compex is a one trick pony, but it is a great trick. There is no real way to get a Compex to ever sound unnoticeable. Even with the most minimal of settings it imparts a lot of character. Picture a chef who has basically one recipe, which is take whatever it is, add bacon and fry it. Yes, delicious, but for soup? Salad? Ice cream? That's a Compex.

Peter, Hugh, Phil, the 80's and MAKE IT GO AWAY

The things the two tracks had in common was engineer Hugh Padgham, and his accidental invention, gated reverb.

I was 16 in 1980. A friend had just bought the latest Peter Gabriel record, which was called Peter Gabriel. His first four albums were all called Peter Gabriel. The 1980 record is nicknamed "Melt" because the cover image is a picture of the man himself with his face half melted.

The first song on the album is a real toe tapper called "Intruder," and sing along kids! It's about a home invasion from the point of view of the invader.

The thing about Intruder, though, is the drums. They had a quality and sound we hadn't heard before. Electronic yet acoustic. Huge but yet squashed and contained. We had no idea what was going on.

And then Peter's former Genesis bandmate Phil Collins released a track called In the Air, that had one of the most iconic drum sounds ever heard... and it sounded a lot like that Invader song.

The things the two tracks had in common was engineer Hugh Padgham, and his accidental invention, gated reverb.

Big commercial studios typically had (or still have) a microphone or two hanging from the ceiling so that the staff in the control room can hear activity in the studio; musicians can simply speak or shout a bit to be heard by the engineer, etc. Solid State Logic added a dedicated listen mic system to their SL4000 E console, and the circuit included a limiter. It had two purposes: 1) Amplify the quietest signals in the room so even someone speaking in a normal voice in the studio could be easily heard in the control room, and 2) Protect the control room speakers and the engineer's ears from loud noises or bangs or enraged lead singers by severely limiting the signal.

The SSL listen mic limiter had a fixed ratio of 100:1, almost instantaneous attack and release, and huge amounts of gain. It was buried down deep and hard wired into the console and wasn't designed to be adjusted. And... it used FETs... is the pattern clear now?

Engineer Hugh Padgham put a noise gate across its output, ostensibly because he didn't want to hear any quiet background noise that can be distracting during a session.

So, Peter and Hugh (and Phil Collins on the drums) are working on Intruder, and Phil is bashing around the kit, and it sounds amazing over the listen mic. Because the talkback limiter was applying huge amounts of gain, which amplified the sound of the room, then crushed the hell out of it, and then the noise gate chopped off the signal abruptly, eliminating the natural tail of the decay of the room.

Hugh Padgham figured out the routing to get the signal to tape, and the sound of the 80's was born, big hair and all. After Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight became a megahit, the gated reverb sound spread everywhere. Michel Jackson, Prince, Madonna, INXS, The Cure, New Order and on and on... it was everywhere. There was no escaping that big ass dumb drum sound.

I was never a huge fan of it, so I was glad it kind of died out. But, like many things, it is back and has become increasingly common again. It is being used with more subtlety (and perhaps taste) than it was during the '80's, but the '80's were never about subtlety. The 1975 have been pilfering a lot of sounds and ideas, including some gated reverb.

It might take a bit of experimenting to get the sound you're looking for, especially if you're compressing and gating the room tracks and there's high hat leakage. Another trick to clean things up is to key the noise gate off of the kick, snare and tom tracks, such that the gate opens up and lets the crushed room sound through just for those instruments. Describing that sort of set up is long and detailed, and this whole column is dragging on at this point.

Of course, just running the room tracks through the Talkback Limiter instantly gets you a sound that is a lot like gated reverb. Increase the gain and you can pretty much match the drum sounds on Radiohead's The Bends album, which are simply fabulous: huge, trashy and percussive.

It is really worth your time to get your drum bus compressor situation suss'd out, whether you use plugins - my fave is the Pawn Shop Comp for this but our Talkback Limiter is great when I want more raunch out of things, or hardware - I use a pair of Compex2’s (like a Compex but with VCA’s instead of FET’s) when drum bus compressing in the material world. Dan Korneff, of course, favors the Pawn Shop Comp and the Talkback Limiter (he did build them for his own use originally) and he favors the original stereo Compex (which has FETs's) when he wants hardware compression.

Dedicated hardware bus compressors might be beyond your budget, and that’s fine. They might not be all that cost effective. My Compex2’s basically sit in the rack until mix time, forlorn and lonely, like the boyfriend of the mermaid we harpooned earlier. Every now and again I try them on something, like a guitar, and they promptly strangle it. Sigh. Back to a tube thing.

Well, that is it for today, kiddos. Some history, some ideas, some bizarre analogies, a little WTF.

Until next time, make great music, make great records.

Luke D. 6/17 in the year of the plague

Luke DeLalio 2/12/2020

In the early 1990's I was freelance producing rock records. There were still big studios and big consoles. Digital recording was taking off but there was still plenty of nice fat analog tape. New, great sounding equipment was being released all the time, and you could still find vintage stuff gear with a bit of poking around. It was a great time to be an engineer.

And the big thing was drum sounds. Everyone was mic'ing the room and gating everything, and triggering samples and doing drum replacement... it was really cool. The Red Hot Chile Peppers released "Blood Sugar Sex Magic" and GASP! They were feeding drum samples into the room and then recording the room sound! Mind blown! And then Steve Albini was making records and Nirvana's "In Utero" sounded like a wonderful live mess. Drum sounds were the holy grail in the early 90's.

I was doing a lot of work out of a studio in Hoboken, New Jersey, called Water Music. It had two rooms: The A room was nicknamed "Heaven." It was HUGE, with a Neve 8088 console in it. The other room was affectionately called "Hell." It was much smaller, and at that time had a ramshackled bunch of mismatched equipment, not even a proper console. Heck, Hell didn't even have a control room - everything was stuffed into one space. You'd set the band up, take a guess with the mics and settings, record a bit and then play it back to see what you got. It took a bit but you could get great sounds. I loved working in Hell. And Hell was a lot cheaper than Heaven. Typically, smaller budget/Indie projects worked in Hell, and the big money sessions worked in Heaven.

One day I came in with a band - I think it was a punk album I was working on - and everyone at at Water Music was excited because in Heaven, cutting an album with some band, was Eddie Kramer.

If you don't know who Eddie Kramer is... he recorded Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin - enough said, right? In the late 60's, using maybe four microphones, a pair of compressors and whatever EQ was on the console at that time - we are not talking about sweepable parametric eq's or anything like that - think high and low shelving and that's it - Eddie Kramer managed to invent rock drum sounds. And rock guitar sounds.

SO... the God of Rock Drum Sounds was in Heaven cutting an album... and he locked the doors and wouldn't let anyone in. The word got around that he didn't want anyone to see his drum mic set-up. It was super secret. Even the main studio assistant, Jim, wasn't allowed into the main live room where the drums were.

I would see Eddie in the morning walking in a courtyard between the studios - he wasn't talkative but he would always flash a friendly smile. He made the assistants sweep the courtyard constantly. The whole thing was a big, weird mystery.

What the hell was he up to in there????

It really didn't take much to stay late one night and wait until the lights were out in the residence part of the studio complex. Water Music was residential, with rooms and suites and a kitchen for artists working in the studios. I once recorded an all girl band in Hell and we all slept together in one huge bed stuffed in a single room. It was platonic.

SO... Jim and I waited until Eddie's lights were out, and we got the master keys for the studio and burgled our way into Heaven to see the top secret Eddie Kramer drum set-up...

It seemed pretty typical. 421's on the toms, top and bottom, a SM-57 on the snare top, I think a Neumann KM-84 on the bottom. A Neumann U-47 FET - often called a FET47, stuffed into the kick, and then there was an AKG D-12 outside of it. The overheads were U-87's or U-67's. He had KM-84s out in the room maybe twenty-five feet away from the kit, but he had them tucked behind gobos - big absorptive panels. This was a cool trick - the gobos kept the mics from from getting any direct sound from the drums. This was an idea I took.

But so far, the big secret set-up was nothing special. But there was one really weird thing...

Five feet out from the drum set, about chest high, centered on the kick and pointing towards the snare, was a Shure VP-88 stereo microphone. I remember it being a VP-88, but I could be mistaken. It was definitely a stereo condenser mic.

Throwing a stereo mic in front of a drum kit was nothing new. I had inherited a little money and blew most of it on a vintage AKG C-24 and used it all the time as a stereo drum mic. But what Eddie Kramer was doing with the VP-88 was something different.

A VP-88 is an MS stereo microphone rather than an XY. MS (Mid Side) stereo mic'ing is really awesome and someday I'll write a whole thing about it, but basically, the VP-88 uses two capsules, one set to cardioid that picks up the center (the middle), and the other set to figure 8 and picking up the left and right (the sides). The two signals are combined in a particular way, lots of phase cancellation ensues, and the net result is really nice stereo with a strong, clear center. It's a very useful technique and I think better sounding than XY.

So, Eddie Kramer had an MS stereo mic in front of the drum set.

That still isn't weird.

What was really weird, was that he had the left and right side of the stereo mic oriented vertically - down towards the floor and up towards the ceiling - rather than to the right and left of the drum set. Picture rotating a stereo mic 90 degrees, so that the left side picks up the ceiling and the right side picks up the floor.

It made no sense. Jim and I had no idea what the hell was up with the VP-88 pointed at the floor and the ceiling. How would you pan that signal in the mix?? I experimented with it on a few subsequent sessions, turning my C-24 up and down rather than left and right, and it always sounded like ass. There were all sorts of weird cancellations caused by things bouncing off the floor and the ceiling. In a small room it was dreadful. Really, it seemed to me to be an awful idea.

In hindsight, maybe it was a red herring. Maybe the VP-88 was plugged in but not even routed anywhere. Maybe Eddie Kramer came up with that doofy mic set-up just to fuck with anyone that snuck in to steal his secrets. And that there was really no secret other than use good mics, use a good drum set, and most of all, record a great drummer. Like Mitch Mitchell or John Bonham.

Or maybe the secret was to have access to a huge room with great acoustics, and a giant console fourteen feet long, and a two-inch 24 track Studer tape deck.

Maybe the secret... is to claim there is a secret! After all, it worked for Eddie Kramer.