Recording - January 2012 - 34

axis, the D19c was decidedly bright, with a broad onaxis +6 dB peak centered around 5 kHz and another, narrower peak at 12 kHz. Low frequencies rolled off below 70 Hz. I haven’t been able to find a reliable response curve for the D20, but Recording the Beatles describes its bass response as flat, with switchable rolloff curves. Norman Smith used this basic 2-mic setup for the remainder of his time with the Beatles, through the Rubber Soul era. When Geoff Emerick took over at the beginning of recording Revolver, he kept Smith’s basic setup, eventually adding a Neumann KM 56 smalldiaphragm condenser mic under the snare (with a pad to avoid overloading the preamp). By the time Sgt. Pepper marched into the Abbey Road studio, Emerick was well on the way to full multi-miking on the drums. For that album he added more D19c mics over the floor tom and under the rack tom. But for the single “All You Need Is Love”, recorded after Sgt. Pepper’s release, he went back to the original Norman Smith setup, a D19c overhead (still at Ringo’s head height) and a D20 on the kick, now positioned at about 12:00 o’clock, halfway out from the center of the skin. (In those days kick drums typically lacked the vent hole that’s common today.) The last years of the Beatles’ recording career featured full multi-miking on the drums, including occasional use of a Sony C-38A condenser as an overhead or kick-drum mic. On the Let It Be album (not recorded at Abbey Road) Glyn Johns used U 67s overhead, a D20 or D12 on the kick (with the front skin removed), a U 67 over the floor tom, and a KM 56 over the snare. The drums sound noticeably different on this album from their sound on the Abbey Road recordings, as one would expect, but Ringo still sounds like Ringo; it’s still the musician that makes the most difference. Is there any way you might begin to recreate the Abbey Road drum sound? Well, you’re not at Abbey Road (I assume), but if you have access to a large recording room with live, warm acoustics (perhaps a medium-sized frame church?), you might try the Norman Smith setup. You can’t buy the mics easily; when I went looking online, the Beatles association had pushed the price of a D20 up to $800, and since dynamic mics change with age there’s no guarantee you’d get one that sounds similar to the mics on Ringo’s kit. For the overhead, probably your best bet would be a Sennheiser MD421 (the Mark I model, not the Mark II) or perhaps an E-V RE16 (a slightly brighter version of the RE15, still in production). You might also try an SM57, preferably operated into a load impedance of 500 ohms or so (you knew I was going to say that). For the kick, I’d suggest an E-V RE20. Remember to place the overhead mic fairly low. And don’t forget the wallet, sweater and tea towels.
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RECORDING JANUARY 2012

1960s and 1970s—The Glyn Johns Measuring Tape Experience In the years after Let It Be, Glyn Johns developed a stereo miking technique which has gained wide acceptance for rock recordings. (Paul Vnuk talks about this too, in his article on page 40 of this issue.) It’s kind of a halfway point between the simple techniques I’ve been discussing and full multi-miking, and if properly executed, it creates an excellent stereo image. The first overhead mic, a condenser, goes directly over the snare drum, at a height of about 40”, and pointed at a particular spot on the drum. (You choose the spot that sounds best.) Measure the distance and write it down; you’ll need it soon. It gets panned to about the 1:30 position. The second overhead, the same model condenser as the first one, is placed to the left of the snare drum (audience view), over the floor tom. Take out your measuring tape; it should be the same distance from the target spot on the snare drum as the first overhead, to keep phase issues to a minimum. Again, Johns likes this distance to be 40”, but the critical thing is that the distance from the drum should be identical to that of the first mic. This mic gets panned hard left. Johns adds spot mics on the kick and snare; the usual suspects can be used here. With the overheads panned as described above, pan the spot mics so they match the kick and snare positions in the stereo image created by the overheads. Voilà, four mics, and you have a stereo mic setup that’s worked for Glyn Johns and others for decades. 1969—Across the Great Divide Here’s a drum miking technique which was hugely influential in the last years of the 1960s and first years of the’70s. It was used on The Band, the album recorded by the group formerly known as the Hawks, who had toured with Bob Dylan when first he went electric in 1966. This album, commonly known as the Brown Album, turned the heads of the entire rock world, to an extent that the Village Voice’s rock critic Robert Christgau, in his “Consumer Guide” columns of short record reviews, had a special category entitled “Band Imitators”. You can hear this sound—including the drum sound— echoed in British folk-rock bands like Fairport Convention and Pub Rock/New Wave bands such as Brinsley Schwarz (which would give us songwriter Nick Lowe). Well, perhaps “echoed” is the wrong word, because one enduring feature of the Brown Album’s sound was the lack of reverb and top boost on anything. This album was cut flat, because the musicians wanted it to sound different from everything else on the market at the time. They succeeded, except that the sound was so widely imitated that within the year many albums had the same unhyped sound. (Fairport’s engineer recalled that, when mixing their classic Liege and Lief album, he’d wanted to add just

Recording - January 2012

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