dwsabianguy
Senior Member
I'm going to add a note about Neil's 80s drum tones:
Gating. The toms are gated immensely. Listening to the isolated drums from Tom Sawyer on the video MikeM posted, I can hear the gates kicking on all of the drums. There's a fill at 3:10 where he plays a 16th-note sort of fill and most of the strokes can't be heard because the gates were clamping down too hard. You can hear a little bit of drums from the overheads, but the sound from the close drum mics has been muted by the gates.
I hear the same sort of super-short gated-tom sort of sound on Presto, but there's a longer hold/release on the snare that gives it a little extra pop. But I'll put money on it - there is definitely a lot of gating going on in those 80s records. A lot of gating and a lot of reverb.
Come to think of it, the giant change in his drum sound came about right around the time In The Air Tonight came out. Neil's sound is a sort of two-headed rebuttal to Phil Collins's concert toms, with what I hear as a kind of "bubbly" sound on many records. Much darker/warmer/smoother than gated concert toms.
Makes me wonder what those albums would sound like without all the gating.
Gating. The toms are gated immensely. Listening to the isolated drums from Tom Sawyer on the video MikeM posted, I can hear the gates kicking on all of the drums. There's a fill at 3:10 where he plays a 16th-note sort of fill and most of the strokes can't be heard because the gates were clamping down too hard. You can hear a little bit of drums from the overheads, but the sound from the close drum mics has been muted by the gates.
I hear the same sort of super-short gated-tom sort of sound on Presto, but there's a longer hold/release on the snare that gives it a little extra pop. But I'll put money on it - there is definitely a lot of gating going on in those 80s records. A lot of gating and a lot of reverb.
Come to think of it, the giant change in his drum sound came about right around the time In The Air Tonight came out. Neil's sound is a sort of two-headed rebuttal to Phil Collins's concert toms, with what I hear as a kind of "bubbly" sound on many records. Much darker/warmer/smoother than gated concert toms.
Makes me wonder what those albums would sound like without all the gating.