RECORDING January 2023 - 30

Padgham
Behind the g ates of the h itmaker
Tell us about the famous gated reverb sound. I know
it was first heard on Peter Gabriel's " The Intruder, "
but you also explored big roomy drum sound on
" Making Plans For Nigel " by XTC that came out in
1979, a year before the Peter Gabriel album.
I did " Making Plans For Nigel " with a young independent
producer named Steve Lillywhite. It wasn't quite the gated thing
yet, but the drum sound was due to the drum room at the Townhouse.
When Virgin designed the Townhouse, they were determined
to have live-sounding rooms.
The trend during the 70s had been dead recording areas
with lots of carpets and cork on the walls. We decided to build
rooms with loads of stone on the walls, flagstones on the floor,
and that sort of thing.
" Making Plans For Nigel " was definitely a roomy sound. But
the actual first time for the " gated thing " was what turned out
to be " The Intruder, " which was Phil Collins playing drums on
Peter Gabriel's third record.
Phil set his drums up in what we used to call the stone room
at the Townhouse in Studio 2, which had the SSL desk. The SSL
desk also had this other innovation: a reverse talkback mic.
The SSL Listen Mic was the opposite of the talkback
mic engineers use to talk with the artists, correct?
Yes, there were mics hanging from the ceiling in both recording
areas, and when you pressed a button, you could hear the
musicians talking to the control room from the studio. Before
that, if you wanted to have the musicians talk to you from the
studio, you had to plug a microphone into one of the console
channels. Obviously, consoles had the regular talkback button.
But this was the first time anyone had ever thought of doing this
reverse talkback thing. Also, the Listen Mic had a very heavy
compressor built in, so if someone was talking quietly at the
back of the room, you could still hear them.
So one day, Phil is setting up his drums and tuning his toms,
and I accidentally (as far as I remember) hit the reverse talkback
button and out came this most ridiculous drum sound.
Everyone just went, " Wow, what's that? We gotta have some
of that. " The problem was that it couldn't be recorded. At the
time, it was purely internal and routed to the monitors. There
was no way to send it out to a tape recorder.
I spoke to the maintenance engineer on duty, and the next morning
when I got into the studio, he had the console's center section
pulled up. He had managed to get a feed off the [Listen Mic] compressor
and wired it through to a patchbay. Suddenly I could patch
out of this reverse talkback circuit and back into a channel in the
console. This meant I could also use the built-in gate on the channel.
So Phil is fiddling with his drums, and we've got the great
massive sound happening, and I punched the noise gate button.
30 RECORDING January 2023
Hugh and drummer Norman Garschke
at British Grove
Suddenly, when Phil stopped playing, you could hear the noise
gate shutting off, which basically killed the reverberation in the
room, and it sounded quite strange. We could change how it
sounded by adjusting the hold and the decay, and Peter had
Phil play a rhythm that worked with that.
Then we sussed out a rudimentary metronome so Phil could
play the drums in time at a fixed rhythm. We didn't have looping
techniques other than cutting and looping tape, so Phil literally
played that pattern live for five minutes, and then Peter
wrote the song around it-and that's how it happened.
And then Phil's song " In the Air Tonight " took all of
the credit. [Both laugh].
Well, I mean, " The Intruder " wasn't a hit. It was too wacky
to be a single. That's why people think " In the Air Tonight " was
the first one because it got more radio play.
What do you remember about that session?
Phil's original demo of " In the Air Tonight " was done with the
Roland CR-78 drum machine and a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5.
The CR-78 was not entirely programmable, although you could fiddle
with it a bit. We couldn't recreate the same sound when we got
into the studio. We couldn't get the pattern the same. We couldn't
get the tempo quite the same. Luckily Phil recorded his demo on a
good 1 " 8-track recorder, so in the end, we just copied it from the
8-track to the 24-track. The gated tom overdub came later, and at
the time, it was the last song we thought would be a single because
it was four and a half to five minutes long. It didn't have a traditional
verse-chorus structure and wasn't a typical single format.
I just reviewed the Hitmaker SDX from Toontrack,
and I love that you can deconstruct and forensically
dig into all of these sounds and processes. What I
found fascinating is that when I pulled up the " Air "
preset, I quickly realized that hi-hats and cymbals
sound terrible running through that compressed
gated effect. Then I went back and noticed that on
" The Intruder, " " In the Air Tonight " and " Mama, "
there was no cymbal work.
Absolutely, cymbals through the reverse talkback mic and
gate are the most God-awful, terrible sound.
On " The Intruder " , even before we discovered the gated
sound, Peter said, " I don't want any cymbals or hi-hat on the
album at all. " So that was quite weird as drummers are used
to playing patterns on the hi-hats and cymbals. Phil put up a
couple of drums where the cymbals are usually.
hugh

RECORDING January 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of RECORDING January 2023

Fade In
Fast Forward
Roland SPD-SX PRO Sampling Pad
Session Log with Marc Urselli: Trasfrontera Japan, taiko drums, Kaoru Watanabe and Anna Sato
Soundware Showcase: Toontrack Hitmaker SDX
PreSonus Studio One Version 6
Hugh Padgham: Behind the Gates of the Hitmaker
LEWITT BEATKIT PRO
Soundware Showcase: Spitfire Audio Abbey Road Orchestra: Low Percussion
Studio 101 with Joe Albano: An Intro to Drum Recording
sE Electronics T2
Solid State Logic SSL CONNEX
API 3122V
Inside the Studio with Mark Hornsby: Steve Gadd
Plugin Outlet: Strymon BigSky Plugin
Panda Audio Future Impact v3
EFNOTE 3X & EFNOTE 7
Readers’ Tracks
Fade Out: New (Year’s) Studio Resolutions
RECORDING January 2023 - Intro
RECORDING January 2023 - Cover1
RECORDING January 2023 - Cover2
RECORDING January 2023 - 1
RECORDING January 2023 - 2
RECORDING January 2023 - 3
RECORDING January 2023 - Fade In
RECORDING January 2023 - 5
RECORDING January 2023 - 6
RECORDING January 2023 - 7
RECORDING January 2023 - Fast Forward
RECORDING January 2023 - 9
RECORDING January 2023 - Roland SPD-SX PRO Sampling Pad
RECORDING January 2023 - 11
RECORDING January 2023 - 12
RECORDING January 2023 - 13
RECORDING January 2023 - Session Log with Marc Urselli: Trasfrontera Japan, taiko drums, Kaoru Watanabe and Anna Sato
RECORDING January 2023 - 15
RECORDING January 2023 - 16
RECORDING January 2023 - 17
RECORDING January 2023 - 18
RECORDING January 2023 - 19
RECORDING January 2023 - Soundware Showcase: Toontrack Hitmaker SDX
RECORDING January 2023 - 21
RECORDING January 2023 - 22
RECORDING January 2023 - 23
RECORDING January 2023 - PreSonus Studio One Version 6
RECORDING January 2023 - 25
RECORDING January 2023 - 26
RECORDING January 2023 - 27
RECORDING January 2023 - Hugh Padgham: Behind the Gates of the Hitmaker
RECORDING January 2023 - 29
RECORDING January 2023 - 30
RECORDING January 2023 - 31
RECORDING January 2023 - 32
RECORDING January 2023 - 33
RECORDING January 2023 - LEWITT BEATKIT PRO
RECORDING January 2023 - 35
RECORDING January 2023 - 36
RECORDING January 2023 - 37
RECORDING January 2023 - Soundware Showcase: Spitfire Audio Abbey Road Orchestra: Low Percussion
RECORDING January 2023 - 39
RECORDING January 2023 - Studio 101 with Joe Albano: An Intro to Drum Recording
RECORDING January 2023 - 41
RECORDING January 2023 - 42
RECORDING January 2023 - 43
RECORDING January 2023 - sE Electronics T2
RECORDING January 2023 - 45
RECORDING January 2023 - Solid State Logic SSL CONNEX
RECORDING January 2023 - 47
RECORDING January 2023 - API 3122V
RECORDING January 2023 - 49
RECORDING January 2023 - Inside the Studio with Mark Hornsby: Steve Gadd
RECORDING January 2023 - 51
RECORDING January 2023 - 52
RECORDING January 2023 - 53
RECORDING January 2023 - 54
RECORDING January 2023 - 55
RECORDING January 2023 - Plugin Outlet: Strymon BigSky Plugin
RECORDING January 2023 - 57
RECORDING January 2023 - Panda Audio Future Impact v3
RECORDING January 2023 - 59
RECORDING January 2023 - EFNOTE 3X & EFNOTE 7
RECORDING January 2023 - 61
RECORDING January 2023 - 62
RECORDING January 2023 - 63
RECORDING January 2023 - Readers’ Tracks
RECORDING January 2023 - 65
RECORDING January 2023 - 66
RECORDING January 2023 - 67
RECORDING January 2023 - 68
RECORDING January 2023 - 69
RECORDING January 2023 - 70
RECORDING January 2023 - 71
RECORDING January 2023 - Fade Out: New (Year’s) Studio Resolutions
RECORDING January 2023 - Cover3
RECORDING January 2023 - Cover4
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