EQ Magazine - January 2009 - (Page 28)

AMERICAN MAJESTY TOREY MUNDKOWSKY to get the diaphragms nice and tight on the two mics so there are no phase issues, close up on the cone. Did you find yourself having to keep the volume down when working with those ribbons? Depending on what you are working with, some makes can be too delicate for a cranked Marshall. They take the high SPL really well. The guitar amps were screaming. We had them in an Iso booth with 80dBrated soundproofed glass and it was still loud. Of course a 57 can handle it, but those ribbons are really durable. They never broke up. Not once. DRUMMER RONNIE VANNUCCI, JR. ON BIGGER BANGS Ronnie Vannucci, Jr. is what producer Stuart Price calls “a fantastic player. He realizes that the biggest secret to his drum sound isn’t how he records it, it’s the sound he makes as a performer. He is one of those people I could record with a video camera’s mic and he would still sound awesome.” Beyond that, the skinsman is The Killers’ resident recording geek. Here, Vannucci, Jr. details his approach to performing and producing the godly drum sounds of Day & Age. What kind of sound were you going for on Day & Age? There wasn’t any concerted effort to sit down and decidedly pick a direction or sound for the record. There are two reasons for that: I don’t think we are good enough to do that just yet, and it’s a good thing not to do that because it would put a muzzle on us. The most important thing about the songs we write are the songs themselves. If you didn’t have a clear idea of how you wanted the album to sound, why did you seek out Stuart Price? What did you anticipate he would be able to bring to the party? Before starting Day & Age, we went to Stuart’s home and started working in his basement studio. Five minutes in we realized this guy was speaking our language. Nothing was lost in translation. It was an easy deal so we decided to do a few songs on Sawdust, a collection of B-sides and cutting room floor material. It was effortless and so fast that we ended up re-recording some old songs because we were ahead of schedule. Brandon Flowers (left) and Stuart Price (right) discussing the last take. From then on we knew Stuart was the guy, not just because he is fast, but he is a musician also. Most producers act as mediators, but he has a musical background to make what you are trying to say a reality. There is a part on “The World We Live In,” a chromatic run, a couple of whole steps making a line into the last chorus. It was easy for me to name a couple references as to how I thought the run should sound—very big and decorated and orchestral. I wanted the line to really sing with flutes and horns. He got it immediately, all I had to say was “A Day in the Life” meets Rufus Wainwright and Phantom of the Opera. You recorded a lot of the drum tracks on the album yourself. I hear you are a minimalist in terms of gear. . . . That’s true. Take “The World We Live In” for example: I actually recorded the drum tracks in our rehearsal studio by [McCarran] airport. If you solo the track you can hear the planes flying overhead. And, yes, that was a bare bones setup, but it sounded great. Two [Shure] Beta 58s as overheads, Audix i5s as tom mics, an Audix d6 on the kick drum, and then two Shure SM57s for the snare, top and bottom. Everything went straight into a MOTU 8pre. I put a lot of heavy compression on the overhead mics to get a nice “smack” effect. I was going for the sound Ringo got on the early Beatles’ recordings. How did your approach change when you hooked up with Stuart? Stuart liked the fact that I was only using eight mics tops for the drums. So we generally kept things the same, though we started using the Earthworks System DrumKit package, which is two TC25 omni condensers for overheads, one SR25 cardioid condenser for the snare, and the KickPad for the bass drum. We would experiment with locations and rooms—most of the album was recorded in an iso booth or a live room—and every once in a while we’d add in a Neumann U87 over my shoulder, but that’s it. The days of me using 23 tracks for drums are over. Why is that? I feel like I don’t have to change my playing as much to accommodate the gear. In turn I don’t have to ride faders to get my point across. I feel like if you put two overheads and a kick drum mic on me, you will get more of an honest sound—both from the drums and from the player—than you would giving every drum two mics. But what about all the snare tracks on “This Is Your Life?” That song is overdub city! But that’s because we were going for a marching band sound. It began 28 EQ JANUARY 2009 www.eqmag.com http://www.eqmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of EQ Magazine - January 2009

EQ Magazine - January 2009 Contents Talk Box Sounding Board Punch In Bob Dylan The Killers Guitar Trax Bass Management Key Issues Drum Heads Vocal Cords Mix Bus Cheat Sheet Microsoft Windows Vista Apple Mac OS X "Lite" Software Roundup "Lite" Software Gadgets & Goodies Sounds Room With a Vu

EQ Magazine - January 2009

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