musique concrete

Hi Mike, Thanks for that. The kick on Somewhat Damaged is a combination of organic and sample. We built a tiny drum booth in the garage at Nothing Studios that could just fit in a drum kit and the ceiling was just high enough to play without hitting the roof too often with the sticks. The floor walls and ceiling were covered in carpet so it was very, very dead. Combined with that the drums were tuned very low and tea towels put on the snare and toms. Trent played the kit and we added a very hard kick that was originally one Trent sampled on his Emax so it had a lot of that gritty dirt. My tip would be to use a sample with your live kit. Take the time to experiment with different samples to get the one/ones that work best with the kit, it's not always the ones you think will work best, it can be quite surprising! The drums on "I'm looking forward...." are recorded in the room at Nothing Studios. That room had a very distinctive sound as it had a low ceiling, concrete but carpeted floor and plaster walls. There was no studio acoustic treatment and it used to be one of the viewing rooms from when the building was a funeral home before Trent bought it. We got a load of junk like boxes bottles and bits of metal with a bass drum tuned low to sound like a Marching band bass drum and Trent went and played a lot of beats at different tempos. I miked the drums only on room mikes as we wanted it to sound "junk percussion like".... kind of a Tom Waits sound. So I used a pair of U87 from large distance and a pair of PZMs on the wood side of a couple of screens. I compressed them fairly hard with an SSL compressor but that stereo blend was what we went with and those drums were from one of those pieces Trent played. Because there were no cymbals it meant the compression wasn't destructive. Hot into the mix: Whatever sounds good I'd say. On the SSL I have all the VCAs routed to another VCA so I can adjust it and I move it up and down to find the "sweet spot". Sometimes really hot works and sometimes not.... I tend to not drive it too hot if I was to err on one side. Thanks. Alan.