How can I give my mixes that organic ABBA sound?
ABBA is not an organic sound. Quite the contrary. Their sound relied heavily on layered vocal tracks, heavy use of digital verbs, and lots of synths.
What do we know about getting that Big Star drum sound?
The earliest Big Star tracks were recorded for Rock City originally by me and Chris Bell (we just “moved” the basic tracks over to the BS project), and the later ones were recorded by John Fry and Chris mostly. The mic’ing techniques were usually about the same for everyone, and quite “normal,” I would say. Neumann 87 or 86 above, perhaps an 84 on snare, or RE-15 or something like that. Not many mics, mostly 3 or 4 on a whole kit. Not REAL close mic’ing, but not WAY back either. Not much processing.
Why doesn’t my song sound like the Foo Fighters?
On the verses, it sounds like they have the drum overheads muted. Sounds like just kick, snare, and hi hat close mic’d. With the high hat slightly off to the side so it stays out of the way of the guitar. When the chorus hits, boom, overheads are in. But they’re actually not pushed all the way to the side, they are more like maybe 55 degress off center. Listen carefully to that first verse, Taylor Hawkins hits a cymbal in the middle and it sounds *nothing*like the cymbal hits during the chorus. It sounds like it got picked up through the hit hat mic – just a clue that the overheads are muted during the verse.
You know the drum sound on The Cure’s Disintegration? Yeah, so, how do I get that?
It could very easily be a metal drum. When you tune them down and keep the stick off the rim, the don’t “ping” so much.Also, It sounds to me like the over heads are a coincident pair centered over the snare and note the crashes are not hit real hard. One good compressor in parallel and medium 16″ crashes will sustain great if you don’t smash them to hard.
Tags: professional-engineers
