why don't my recorded drums ever sound like the Flaming Lips?

-- Jack Battery-Pack (Jackbatterypac...), July 9th, 2006.

I think that's the case with some of it, eg the delayed snare fills on the Wand, but having watched the Fearless Freaks DVD, Stephen Drodz is seen playing the precise but funky beats from the Soft Bulletin live in the studio. He's incredible, like a machine.

They should invent some sort of "drumming machine" to make this whole process easier!

As well, Drozd is a heavy hitter in the tradition of Bonham. So much of the sound associated with "good sounding drums" can be boiled down to the player's technique/style and their ability to tune the kit and make it sound good in a recording situation.

But asking why you can't get your recorded drums to sound like any one particular recorded drum sound is somewhat silly. Until you have the same drummer, kit, room, mics, and engineer it's pretty damn near impossible to more than approximate the same drum sound.

Also worth considering the drums and heads. It's less a matter of whether you have a *fancy* kit or not (the things that make these kits fancy are sometimes arbitrary), but what sizes are they? Are the shells round and sound? Are the lugs and rims in decent enough shape that the drums can be gotten in tune? The heads are also pretty important in my experience -- you can take a plain steel snare and make it sound pretty damned good with the right head combination (I'd say a medium to heavy coated batter side head for a ringier metal drum, and use moon gels or similar to get rid of excess ring).

I've been laying down drum tracks all week so I've been thinking a lot about this. Technique definitely matters. Last time we recorded, my technique was a little weak and it left a lot of things that had to be *covered up* in the mix, whereas this time I was in much better shape and it led to the drums naturally sounding good with much less work.

If you want to test that theory, just take a drum recording, add a bunch of reverb, and compress the whole thing at once -- you'll hear a kind of cut-rate Lips effect in the way the reverb (which is acting as a fake room sound) pumps out around each drum hit and then closes itself back off.

Room mics are totally essential across the board, yeah -- unless you're intentionally doing some kind of Martin Hannett Joy Division thing where you want each drum to have separate space. But most rock music, at least, wants us to hear the drums as one coherent element, not a pile of separate performances: drop back and get room sound! The total-separation thing seemed to take over in the 80s, but that was primarily for huge well-manicured productions -- and ones where, despite separating every drum, they still had the time, budget, and skill to sit there and put them all back together in a way that sounded coherent. The average rock band doesn't seem to need to bother with that -- it's just making loads more work and possibilities for failure.

But also the weird mismatch of ambineces you get from combining different takes (say the snare in one take was miked far a way and with the skin yuned low; the high tom closer with no bottom skin; the cymbals compressed and gated so they totally mismatch everything else.

It's a neat trick. On the utterly great OUTSIDE, Bowie/Eno used four or five takes of the same song played by as many different drummers along with drum machines and sequenced samples,

Unlike Freidman/Lips whose goal is zany chaos, Eno/Bowie wanted to essentially control the mood of every section of every song.

http://www.breathingprotection.com/sound_on_sound_fridmann.pdf

There's also a little feature in the June issue of future music magazine about the Flaming Lips recording At War With the Mystics. Here's what Steven says about recording drums on the last few albums:

"On The Soft Bulletin, we would have used two ambient room mics and turned up all the distortion. On Yoshimi, we had that, but there was a lot more programming on that than there is on this record. This time there's just a lot more live playing with smaller drum kit sounds that are close-miked."