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Mississippi Delta to create a new, hard, urban sound (and the youngster from St. Louis who blended in a touch of country music) made great records in a long, narrow room shaped more like a hallway than a traditional recording studio. (A few of Chess’s records were made at Bill Putnam’s place, but the majority were recorded in-house.) How did they mike the drums? This is one of those times where Abe Lincoln’s quote applies: it depends who you believe. One source says Chess Records owned nothing but Electro-Voice mics, which they got in a special deal from E-V. Another source says they also had RCA ribbons and a Telefunken mic (presumably a U 47—Neumann made U 47s to be sold under the Telefunken badge in early postwar years). Whom do you trust? Your ears, of course. Listening to early 50s Chess recordings, mostly produced by Willie Dixon, I hear the characteristic sounds of a drumkit recorded with a single microphone, and it sounds very much like an E-V dynamic. (Probably a 664 or 666.) Was it over the drums? Perhaps, but it could equally be in front of the kit, perhaps pointing at the rim of the snare from a few feet away. In any case, the sound is very plain; no multiple mics on the toms or the cymbals, and no mic (usually) on the kick. The drums are mixed toward the back rather than up front; in many of these recordings, the voice, bass and Little Walter’s harmonica carry the rhythm. On “I Just Want to Make Love to You”, I hear a different setup—I’m pretty sure there’s a mic on the kick as well as the main mic on the drumkit. It still sounds like an E-V dynamic, and the drums are still mixed low; they’re actually below the level of Dixon’s string bass, so the kick melds with the sound of the bass into a deep, throbbing beat. Could you do this? E-V 664s are fairly common and cheap on Ebay, although they probably won’t sound like they did in 1952. (The diaphragms and their suspensions age and stiffen, causing the mics’ sound to change.) It’s worth a try, though, if you want a really plain and funky sound. Don’t let the mic get too close, and don’t use any reverb. There was an echo chamber at Chess, and they used it, but mostly on vocals and melody instruments; I never hear it on drums. 1958—Peggy Sue The recordings of Buddy Holly were renowned in their own time as some of the best-sounding records available; Holly himself had high standards, as did his producer Norman Petty. And they could sound weird sometimes. Perhaps the classic example was “Peggy Sue”. The drums were miked in the standard Norman Petty arrangement: a Telefunken U 47 overhead, an RCA ribbon on the kick, and
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an Electro-Voice RE15 on the snare, a dynamic mic with a remarkably flat frequency response on- and off-axis, and very little proximity effect. What made it weird was the echo chamber; the track had heavy echo on it, and Petty switched the feed from the chamber on and off in time with the beat. He also rode the fader heavily, again with the beat, producing a bizarre, pulsating sound that complemented Holly’s stuttering vocal perfectly. You could do this if you wanted to—but it would have to be on exactly the right song. 1960s—Soul Men We know something about the great soul recordings made by the Memphis label Stax, using their house band (known on their own as Booker T. and the MGs). In fact, we know several things; unfortunately, they contradict each other. What we’re sure about is that the Stax studio was in a converted theater, with the control room on what had been the stage and ceilings some 15–20 feet high. The drums and drummer sat on a platform jutting out from a side wall; one source suggests the drum area was well-isolated from the rest of the room, while others say it was open. In either case, I hear less leakage of the drums into other instruments on Stax records from the mid-Sixties than I do on other recordings from the same time. A seemingly-knowledgeable source adds details. The drums were tuned lower than usual for that characteristically deep soul-drum sound, and the drummer—Al Jackson, Jr.—kept his wallet on top of the snare drum. When he hit the snare, the wallet would jump into the air as the head rebounded, then land back on the head a fraction of a second later. This did two things: it produced another sound closely following the original snare hit, and it muffled the head’s further vibrations. How did they mike the drumkit? One story is that they put an RCA ribbon (probably a 77 series) under the hihat, perhaps pointed at the rim of the snare, with a second ribbon mic on the kick. Another, talking about later years, describes a limited multi-miking setup: a condenser mic overhead (perhaps a Neumann U 67, or in later years a U 87), an Electro-Voice RE20 on the kick, and a Neumann KM 84 5–8” away from the bottom of the snare drum. This informant suggests that sometimes an RE15 or a Shure 545 (precursor to the SM57) would be used on kick or snare.

Recording - January 2012

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