Drums on St. Vincent records?

[alexdingley]

Just spent the afternoon doing some DIY mastering on my band, and I was comparing the masters to some existing material from my CD collection... One of the tunes I compared my mixes to is:

Artist: St. Vincent
Album: Strange Mercy
Song:Dilettante

I'm a big fan of hers, and in particular, the sound of the albums — I love the Toms in this song. Anyone have a sense of how that sound is likely to be achieved? Is it most likely just samples triggered / sequenced? Or is that round of a tom sound readily achievable with just the right mic-position & compression?

[Nick Sevilla]

Hi,

My best guess is programmed drums.

To do these acoustically, you'll need:

1. A consistent drummer. Who can hit the drums at nearly the same level each time. They do exist.

2. A good microphone set. I've done these types of sounds with a range of mics from Shure sm57s, to AKG 451s. It all depends on how much "clean detail" you want out of your recording.

3. In order to really nail the DISTORTION that is happening on the kick and snare, you should reocrd the drummer cleanly, and then do post processing. My favorite type of distortion for this is the Neve preamps. If you do not have a hardware one (yeah they are mucho bucks), then use a plug in. FO that I recommend the Scheps 73 from Waves, because it has the switch between "LINE" and "MIC", which is crucial to overdrive the circuit properly.

Cheers

[Recycled_Brains]

John Congleton's work is great.

I'd have to go back and listen to the St. Vincent album, but typically I hear a lot of over-the-top, yet somehow still tasteful distortion on his mixes. He's really good at that. I wouldn't be surprised if what you're hearing as samples is really just heavily gated and destroyed drum sounds. I highly recommend listening to the Tape Op Podcast episode with him. It's fantastic and insightful.

[kslight]

Sounds like a couple things going on. Synth drums probably layered with samples. The snare drum especially sounds like the "acoustic snare drum modeling synth" built in to Kong, the drum instrument that comes with Reason. I'm not saying that's necessarily where it came from, only that I've heard that sound before when playing with Reason.