Microphones used on Zeppelin songs

[Zeppelin4Life]

, Zeppelin4Life (whose real name is Dave Lombardo, isn't it?) and a Beyer m160 will never help you get there.

yeah it is. I cant buy drum stuff without the whole store going nuts. thnx for the suggestions

[lobstman]

I cant buy drum stuff without the whole store going nuts.

Ha, fuck 'em. I went in to a shop once to get a Rat pedal for use with my bass, and the reaction those ponytailed wankers has was amazing. You would have thought I'd pissed on their larger-than-life cutout of Stevie Ray Vaughn while screaming about how bad Eric Clapton sucked. So I played a lot of Joy Division type chord stuff to REALLY bum them out. (OK, one guy there was pretty cool).

[kellyd]

I'm with Skeeter. The sound of both the bass and drums were ground breaking for 1969. The sound of Jones' bass is what conviced me to become a bass player some 29yrs ago. It's amazing how full and bassy it is yet without any treble you can hear every hi note. It isn't muddy just huge and full. And Skeeter was right about being able to hear the bass amd kik on the worst sytsems. Even on the mono speaker in the dash board of some crap delco system. Drums never sounded the like Bonham before and people still use it as an example of the Holy Grail of rock drums sounds. The fidelity is questionable by today's standards but still sounds cool by my book. I don't use Zep as a ref but then as much as I loved The Beatles I don't use their records either. Anyone mix drums on the right and the Bass on the left? While we're at it, try and use a current record as a ref thru decent speakers. Useless. You can't tell what the mix sounded like before smastering. In the old days MEs would apply as much compression as the material would support. Now it's all about getting the rms to crank at -8dbfs regardless of what it sounds like. Think I'll take Zep distortion over the crap I hear now. Now that I think about it maybe I'll start using Zep as a ref. At least you can hear transients and space between the kik.

[coniferouspine]

I used to think that my Led Zeppelin CDs (the remastered ones, 2, and 4, and grafitti primarily) were the best recordings I owned and used them as mix references. One day, while trying to analyze the production techniques of "Heartbreaker" on headphones I realized that these recordings are all pretty mediocre - really nothing to be impressed by at all. What happened? I stopped listening to the music and I could finally hear the recordings. Ignoring Page, Bonham, and JPJ (ignoring plant is 100% necessary IMHO) was one of the hardest things I've had to do as a music listener since they're one of my favorite groups, but when I did it was a revelation. I realized that the impressive qualities were ALL THEM, and the recordings were nothing to write home about at all. I've stopped using these discs as references and mine are getting better.

I'm totally down with this concept. I only use Led Zeppelin recordings as a "reference" for things like feel, groove and balls. Well except of course now I use some of them for drum samples! But technically, they're not that great recordings. But I find I'm more into Page for reasons like that famous whammy bar "Berroooooing" sound on the beginning of the guitar solo to "In The Evening" (WTF?) or the slide guitar sound on "What Is And What Should Never Be" or the solos on "Presence" that in guitar/music terms are like, what kind of fractured nonsense garbage is he playing? But they rock. And see, that's all music I'm talking about and not really the production. "The Wanton Song" sounds cool, but it's really just a pretty straight recording, it doesn't really *sound* that awesome at all.


And kudos to the guy who pointed out about John Paul Jones and the riffs. EXACTLY. Black Dog was totally a JPJ riff.

[Family Hoof]

DONT GET ME WRONG! I'm not saying those recordings werent great for their time. Certainly not the best, but good and rockin', for sure. I'm saying that they really don't compare to what's possible these days - even when you're trying to emulate a vintage sound - and I stopped using them for sonic references after realizing this.