Recording - January 2020 - 72

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SNAPSHOTS FROM RECORDING HISTORY

DRUM SHADOWS

Guest Editorial by Scott Dorsey
This is Shadow Wilson on drums, along with an unknown bass
player, in a studio in New York sometime between 1938 and 1948.
Shadow Wilson played drums behind some of the biggest big
bands of the day-Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Woody Herman-and he played behind small combo groups fronted by the
likes of Errol Garner, Thelonius Monk, and Ella Fitzgerald.
Check the microphone on the bass (Altec 639 'Birdcage').
There's likely a miked-up soloist not in the frame. There doesn't
appear to be a mic on the drums. If you listen to jazz recordings
of the 1930-1950 vintage, the drums
aren't in your face, even when they're
loud, sharp, or bright. They have some
distance and they sound like they're
naturally behind the soloist. Even in vintage stereo recordings, the drums sound
like they're coming from one spot in the
room rather than being spread across
the mix. In this session, the drums were
picked up in the main microphone, and
ultimately, all the mics!
Why do we spot mic drums today?
In part, it's because close mics are
heavily used on the rest of the instruments. The drums need to match them
to fit into the mix. This gives a sound
that can be big and exciting.
Do you want the drums to be big and exciting? You might,
but then again, it might detract from the soloist. Mixes should
be built around the 'money channel'-usually, a singer or lead
instrument. Rarely is the music just about the drums. So, having
the drums recessed in the mix, the way it would sound live at an
acoustic concert, can be a valid and deliberate artistic strategy.
Giving soloists their own microphones was a common practice
in the 1940s. It was also common to provide the bass with its own
microphone, or risk losing essential acoustic textures in the mix.
Not drums though. In the 1970s-the latter days of the great
and adventurous bandleader Stan Kenton, Stan fought with
producers at Columbia Records over the by-then common practice of spot miking drums; he didn't like the sound of the closemiked drums because that's not how he heard them from his
72 RECORDING January 2020

conductor's podium. Stan wanted the recording to sound like
the band, while Columbia wanted it to sound larger than life,
because that was the fashion of the day.
Today we tend to put mics all over the drum kit. Tracks are
cheap-it never hurts to record a few more! But just because
you record them all doesn't mean that you need to use them all
in the final mix. Maybe the drum overheads are fine on their
own, maybe one microphone in front of the kit is enough. Maybe one microphone across the room will give a distant sound
that will integrate more effectively with
the ensemble. You don't know until you
try it, and the miracle of having many
tracks is that you can indeed try them
all and make final decisions at mixdown about which ones to use.
Back in the 1970s, people were
very eager to put a lot of compression
and/or reverb on tracks and buses,
to make huge drum sounds with long
sustain and decay times. Then for a
while in the 1980s, the 'Phil Collins
Gated Sound' became fashionable,
with gates on drum signals set to make
drum sounds explode in your head.
These were fresh sounds in their day,
but if you listen to those records now, they sound dated.
Natural drum tones never sound dated. Maybe you don't
want the drums to be as distant as in some of the old Stan Kenton recordings, but in a small room like the one depicted here,
they can only be so distant-sounding anyway.
I can't tell you what the next big drum fad is going to be-
maybe it'll be people playing drums underwater, or outdoors,
or through autotune. But I can guarantee you that whatever the
next big thing is, a decade later it'll sound dated-while realistic
acoustic drum sounds will always be contemporary.
Maybe you don't even need to mic the drums...
Scott Dorsey (dorsey@recordingmag.com) is an audio engineer
and enthusiastic student of the history and technology of recorded sound. He loves microphones, but sometimes he doesn't put
any on the drums.

Recording - January 2020

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