fleetwood mac drums

[carter]

anybody know specifics on how they acheived that awesome dead sound?
I love all the low end in the sound. Snares tend to be mixed very high.
I was thinking of switching my dynamics for close micing from 57's to EV PL20's. they have great low mid range.

[drumsound]

Lots of ttape possibly with a little paper towel or some other padding. Most likely no bottom heads. Record in a dry space.

If you really want to sound like Mick Fleetwood as a player use dead fish instead of drumsticks and play farther behind the beat than needed.

[RefD]

bath towel instead of tea towel?

[drumsound]

bath towel instead of tea towel?

soaking wet bath towel

[don't really put a wet towel on your drums]

[RefD]

*places entire carton of cigarettes on snare drum head*

[carter]

no bottom heads huh? not as much resonance then right?
any good articles out there explaining the taping method? were towels placed over the entire head of drums. would he do that to the rack and floor too?

[jetboatguy]

The Rumours album as we all know it,
The anomaly of recording to 2" was that the master tape 'first generation' drums are history.

the album took well over year, of constant recording and mixing... to the point of wearing out the oxide off the tape, hence making the bedtrack drums sounding dull... a backup tape of the bedtrack drums was later piggy backed 'bounced back' onto the original tape to replace the dull sounding drums... and this was 100% A-B roll scenario, manually adjusting the vari-speed by hand to sync the 2 tape machines during the transfer.... uggh !

[johnmarkpainter]

I've got a giant marching Snare that nails the MF tone.
Also got a nice set of Concert toms...try miking the toms from the bottom.

jmp

[Gebo]

I usually go for a very roomy, very open drum sound. However, lately I have been super into that who 70's "dead" sound. I dont have a dead/dry room at my space, so I was thinking of building some sort of movable walls that I can use to enclose the kit for this purpose. Has anyone ever done this?

[thieves]

The Rumours album as we all know it,
The anomaly of recording to 2" was that the master tape 'first generation' drums are history.

the album took well over year, of constant recording and mixing... to the point of wearing out the oxide off the tape, hence making the bedtrack drums sounding dull... a backup tape of the bedtrack drums was later piggy backed 'bounced back' onto the original tape to replace the dull sounding drums... and this was 100% A-B roll scenario, manually adjusting the vari-speed by hand to sync the 2 tape machines during the transfer.... uggh !

this sounds like a complete recipe for disaster! did they do it at a slower speed?

[drumsound]

no bottom heads huh? not as much resonance then right?
any good articles out there explaining the taping method? were towels placed over the entire head of drums. would he do that to the rack and floor too?

I don't know about specific articles but I've seen and done a bunch of different things over the years.

When I was in junior high and a bit into highschool I used to take old socks and cut rectangles about 1.5"x3", sometimes a little smaller sometimes a little bigger. I'd then tape those to the edges of the tom heads using electrical tape on the borders on three sides to affix it to the head. I'd usually run tape strips across the pad so it was covered in the black tape. I've seen a pentagon shape in 1" duct tape or electrical tape on each tom. I've also seen just patches of duct tape at varying distances from the rim. Sometimes with duct tape or with gaffers tape I've seen people make fins like a heat sink and then tape that to the head. There was a 'freelance' guy who did some work where I used to work that liked to use sanitary napkins on the drumheads and sometimes inside the drums.

I think the dampening and the lack of bottom heads went hand in hand. Toms with no bottom heads pretty much sound like boing-y crap.

You can augment this with also surrounding the drums with packing blankets or soft gobos to cut down on the room resonance.

[dynomike]

This has been discussed before, on this forum. Do a search and hopefully you can find all the old posts on it that people might not be too willing to restate.

What I remember from the other thread (other than whats already been stated here) is that they had piezo pickups on the drums which were used to trigger gates for each close mic. I believe thats why they could get such a loud, close, attack-heavy snare without a whole lot of cymbal wash.

in addition to the muffling tips here, I'd suggest tuning the snare bottom head a little looser than you might normally, to brighten up the crack. The drums on that record are very muffled in their sustain, but they are anything but dull. Using bright, fast mics and preamps, and recording without any compression should help achieve this sound in conjunction with the muffling and gating. If you do compress in the mix, use a slow attack, like an opto compressor.

The drums were recorded with quad 8 am-10 preamps, i believe.. not sure about the mics. I just got a little rack of these on ebay, actually!

[wedge]

this was 100% A-B roll scenario, manually adjusting the vari-speed by hand to sync the 2 tape machines during the transfer.... uggh !

That's so cool... No doubt the imperfections of the transfer added something interesting...

[kraigmason]

SOUND ON SOUND either July or August 2007 issue has a lengthy Rumors article that goes into pretty good detail including drum recording technique.
there is also a VH1-Classic Albums on Rumors that is less detailed, but still has some good tidbits.


K.

[Pascal Garneau]

If you really want to sound like Mick Fleetwood as a player use dead fish instead of drumsticks and play farther behind the beat than needed.

I thought that was the J Geils Band drummer that did that. Love Stinks?