Producer, engineer, and bassist Jon Evans tracked Brickwall Drums at his Brick Hill studio. We talked with him about capturing the kit, the mics he reached for, and why restraint — not force — makes drums hit.
You've called the instruments themselves the most important part. How did you approach capturing this sound?
First and foremost, as always: the actual instruments are the most important thing by far. Then it's a combination of who's hitting them, where they are, and what kind of room they're in. A good drummer adjusts how they hit based on a room — they're only going to hit as hard as a room can take, because every room brings up a different amount of energy. A lot of people who get behind a kit make the mistake of trying to hit it as hard as humanly possible at all times, and there's so much more to it — having the technique to draw the tone out of the drum. It's not a quintessential designed studio, but that room has a vibe and a clarity that works really well for drums.
What did the mic setup look like?
I didn't go crazy with microphones — I tried to set it up like a session rather than a million mics for mic's sake. Traditional 421s on the toms, and when we spot-miked them we also put up a 414 as a more hi-fi option for the single tom. I used a center U149, a large-diaphragm Neumann, so you could get the sound of the snare from six feet up, where that largeness develops with some space. Traditional 57s on the snares, a D112 on the kick with a nice subkick. The Coles as overheads have been a life-changing mic choice — I ran the gamut for years, KM54s, KM84s, 414s, Mojaves, my Sony C37As, and once I got the Coles, the search was over.
A lot of the character seems to come from the room mic. Can you walk through how you get that "squashed room" sound?
Experimentation is the best possible thing. If you don't know what something does, grab a knob and turn it all the way — you'll learn what it does. One misconception I always had was that compression makes things bigger and better; it doesn't always. With a far-away room mic, all it does is turn the sound up but bring the volume way down, and the makeup gain brings it back in. So really playing with attack and release is what you want. If your release is very quick, you hear all that space between the mic and the source, and it sounds very live and exciting. You can make a small dry room sound exciting with compression and limiting — it's all in the combination of ratio, attack, and release.
You've talked about an all-analog, minimal-fix philosophy. Did that carry over here?
Coming from a background where fixing and editing were much harder, the most important thing is having musicians who can play, so you don't have to do much of it. I'd never change how I mic something based on editing capabilities — I'd be more focused on getting the right people in the room. It's so nice now to be able to edit the pants off everything, but the concept of how you want something to sound reigns supreme; everything else is a workaround. Limitations of your recording environment get dealt with through musicianship and placement.
One thing people notice with sampled drums is that the harder you hit, the less tone you get. How did you handle that?
A drum can only be hit so hard, and a room can only take so much. When we set everything up, we started by having him hit as softly as possible and work up to loud — to where the drum still sounded good, and that was "loud." He was never above his head hitting as hard as he could. We could've hit another 10–15% harder, but it would've been all transient with no meat to work with. So it was more like hitting from one to nine, not one to ten.
These sounds are meant to be played by a composer at a keyboard, not a drummer. Did that change your approach?
I might have, if we were going for a different kind of drum sound — the plasticky, single-headed tom sound of the late '70s, or a less dynamic sound. There are lots of engines out there that do the dead-drums thing. The one thing I did differently was adding that 414 on the toms for a bit more air, especially on the lighter hits. Matthias was set up in a fashion indicative of the era — those guys grew up listening to jazz drummers because rock drummers didn't exist yet, most played traditional grip, and the cymbals sit really low and close to the drums. We tracked them like that so you'd have that ambience.
One of the taglines deals with the "human feel" of the instrument, versus heavily-processed VSTs. What does that unlock for a composer?
If you have all those dynamic gradations available, it could be really interesting to see the kind of music that comes from it — it could be a lot more tuneful. We've gotten into this place collectively with music, this level of limiting on every little thing, especially with sample libraries where everything's right there at 10. Having the ability to really play with the dynamics and the toneful nature of the toms should be super cool.
You've said scoring is trending toward intimacy. How does this kit fit that?
People forget: they'll ask "why does this song from the '60s sound so big, and my track doesn't and I've got 10 guitars on it?" Well — that's why. They had one great guitar, through a great amp and a killer mic, played by someone who really knew how to play it, taking up a huge amount of the sonic spectrum. There's a lot to be said for creating space, not filling up every possible bandwidth. That's where you can actually hear the decay on a drum, or a little amp noise as it trails off. We call that the puffy booms.
As a bass player as well as an engineer, what are you listening for?
Tuning, given the song and the key — something people often miss. You get a great drum sound, then the piano player comes in on an A-flat and the snare only sounds good on a G, and it's terrible. Acoustic instruments resonate; just because they sound good in a vacuum doesn't mean they'll work with the song. It's great to have a drummer who can recognize that. And the two snares on this kit cover all the bases — I love both of those drums so much, they're so versatile. I could go to war with those two snare drums.
If you had one message for someone using these drums, what would it be?
Experiment with the softer hits — don't feel like you have to mash it all the time. Those guys from that era all had a lot of feel and a lot of touch. It's not always "hit it as hard as you can." That internal dynamic range is what made those players play the way they do. If everything's at velocity 127, it might sound cool for a moment, but it can be exhausting for the listener. There's a lot of duration in a soft tom hit — it can ring out a lot longer than the ones that have been smashed. That might serve you well as a composer: "oh, if I hit it like this, that's got a three-second decay." Those individual dynamics are just really important.
