That Eighties Drum Sound

Never owned it, but both those singles lodge in my early radio love memory. In fact somebody around here was playing her greatest hits album a few weeks back and I broke into a lip-sync routine to "If Anyone Falls" complete with twirly dance.

Seriously, you don't know what a snare sounds like in comparison with other drums? Okay, I'll try my best here, in as general terms as possible: the snare is a drum with, uh, metal "snares" lined on the bottom of it, which gives the drum a "thwack" sound with a fast attack and decay, as opposed to a tom drum which has longer sustain and thusly a more discernable pitch (although either kind can be tuned. Also, snares have a switch whereby the snare can be pulled off the drum, making it sound more like a regular tom). Snare drums are most commonly used in pop/rock music as the main signifier of the beat, although plenty of funk/soul stuff uses the snare for more than just that (think of "The Funky Drummer" beat, where lots of snare flourishes are used). Usually, in pop/rock toms are used for fills (although sometimes to keep the beat too, cf. Maureen Tucker).

I don't have a special attachment to any particular drum sound in and of itself. It's all just a matter of how it's used.

Digital Reverbs + California + Cocaine = 80's gated snare sound.

The whole reason the thin 80's drum sound came into vogue is because all the producers and engineers on LA were coked out of their minds.

Surely the Fairlight had as much to do with this type sound as cocaine? (I'm thinking Cupid & Psyche here - I think the snare sounds used reflect the much maligned type of sound mentioned upthread, but are done very well)

Surely late period tech-step dnb also suffers from snare abuse courtesy of No U Turn's lead?

But some people did it right. The drum sound on REM's Murmur is a bit on the boxy side, but incorporated very well into the rest of the sound. Fits like a glove, actually -- the whole sound is thin, so why not the drums? Come to think of it, maybe that was REM's trick -- tailoring their entire sound to fit those awful 80's drums. Genius.

ummmm, don't know that....have never seen/heard any explanations other than formalistic/self-definitional (as per Tom's comment way above)....but what they actually achieved at this end of the deal was:

On 'Low' (& 'Climate Of Hunter') - alienation through the synthetic, the artificial, the inhuman - a microburst of sensory-deprivation, off-white noise injected into yr ears: unfamiliar and cold/harsh sounding inorganic-ness - not atavistic collective monkey-warmth of ppl hitting animal skins with sticks *
(ha technology just ain't what it used to be...)

On 'In The Air Tonight' - the sound is actually quite woody and boomy and organic and warm, so => 'feel my emotions as deep as the oceans great big tree-trunk drums i'm hitting with all this primal intensity'

On ZTT & Scritti - the sound of a life that was larger than life

On lots of other 80's records - the sound of a stick rattling a designer swill bucket

*check SMinds R2R Cacophony of 79/80 also for drumsound treatments attempting to 'de-humanise' the soundscape

sidethought: possible problem with using drum machines of late 70's era to obtain metaphor 1 other than lack of programmability was the bossanova hachacha cultural connections, the wooden-ness of the timbres due to generation via filtered noise bursts (though it worked (sort-of) OK for the Cabs when they cranked them up/treated them).
Roland CR-78 a la 'Metamatic' seems to be 1st drum machine not only to allow degree of programmability but also provide sounds of a sufficiently inhuman/metallic sharpness of character to represent JF's particular smoothie/romantic take on urban-futurist disengagement - but the shape of those sounds was key: clean and geometric rather than murky or flat or grimy as per CV

(interesting to consider relative absence of this approach on Numan's late 70's work, especially given his futurist/alienation schtick : how many tracks apart from 'i nearly married a human' use other than 'normal' drum sounds ?)

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds like some very Prince-style non-linear reverb

xp!

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