That Eighties Drum Sound

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I think eno/bowie got the idea from conny plank..
whether he can be blamed for padgham/lillywhite's excesses I dunno

great organic drums on nearly every volcano 7" which ruled dancehall reggae up until '85, brilliant use of DX, Linn Drum in early digital dancehall too by steely & clevie

Pete Murder Tone, Friday, 19 May 2006 05:50 (eighteen years ago) link

isnt the gated reverb just a way of getting a huge reverb on a faster track so that the reverb tails dont swamp the next beat ie the kind you can get away with on a slow ballad, or in reggae on the one-drop where there is only one snare hot per measure -- where massive reverbs have never been a problem ;)

Pete Murder Tone, Friday, 19 May 2006 05:57 (eighteen years ago) link

Yes. I know from working on stuff not aimed at creating the monster snare thing that this was the idea and a handy trick it was indeed.

At fisr it was the Conny Plank/Bowie thing--just tucking the reverns' tail.

Then you had digital reverns that could gate themselves, whcih sounds kind of pervy in a Gary Numan way.

Then the AMS reverbs came out and an entire decade was well fucked: presets for out of phase gated snares, gated snares that sounded like Peugeuts angrily screwing, reverse gated snares, reverse gated snares where the tail was sampled and played itself before the beat was played. Millions of possibilties.

Through most of the 80s I supported myself engineering demos and the first thing people would ask for--be they goth manques, metal heads, popsters or whomever--was, "Can you get the snare bigger?' which once acheived, was always followed by "Can you mix it louder?"

The for real suck aspect sonically speaking was that many of these AMS-y devices didn't exactly have God's own sampling rates and such and so when you stuck them on everything, as people did because they were new and that's reason enough, you ended up with that overall tinny sound we all avoid so deftly.


Grey, Ian (IanBrooklyn), Friday, 19 May 2006 06:15 (eighteen years ago) link

Excuse my typos. Obviously, talking about this has unearthed deep trauma.

Grey, Ian (IanBrooklyn), Friday, 19 May 2006 06:17 (eighteen years ago) link

seven months pass...
This commercial

So that's what Lars Ulrich is doing these days...

Zachary Scott (Zach S), Sunday, 7 January 2007 21:15 (seventeen years ago) link

twelve years pass...

An echo of that other thread, but check out the drum sound on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S12lkhgM4uA

Josh in Chicago, Thursday, 21 November 2019 19:53 (four years ago) link

Haven't listened to "Flamethrower" in eons, why did it never dawn on me what a Prince rip it is?

A breezy pop-rock feel fairly typical of the mid-'80s (Dan Peterson), Thursday, 21 November 2019 20:14 (four years ago) link

If it's any consolation, I hear Phil Collins now has to live in a gated community.

fetter, Thursday, 21 November 2019 20:48 (four years ago) link

Sounds like some very Prince-style non-linear reverb

xp!

change display name (Jordan), Thursday, 21 November 2019 20:48 (four years ago) link

Had Prince gotten into that by 1981? That was still the pretty dry "Controversy" era, right? (Though post Peter Gabriel III.)

Josh in Chicago, Thursday, 21 November 2019 20:52 (four years ago) link


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