What on earth went wrong with the drums sounds on Heart's "How Can I Refuse?"

Their last Top 40 hit prior to their Holly Knight/Jim Vallance-assisted leap into multiplatinum superstardom two years later. Not a bad tune at all. But . . . listen to the first tom hits at 0:07, and then in the chorus at about 0:37 and throughout the song thereafter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX7xnOMD39Y

The gates on those drums are set so tightly that they sound more like accidental tape dropouts than they do drum hits. Why on earth would a producer, mixing engineer, mastering engineer or label let a recording with that sound on it get released? The producer, Ron Nevison, manned the boards for Physical freakin' Graffiti, for pete's sake, so I know he knows what drums are supposed to sound like.

WTF?

holy shit

it doesn't sound as egregious after the intro, but those first two hits are painful

Right? Every time I hear this song I think, "Is something wrong with my CD/CD player/iPod/mp3 file/whatever?" It's just unbelievable.

yikes that is weird.

I think it was those Simmons hexigonal electronic drums you see in the video. They looked cool, they sounded awful, but were de rigueur for any early-to-mid '80s band that wanted to look good on MTV.

I always thought the oddly synthetic drum sounds (even when real drums were used for recording) were just an attempt to create a different sound. Kind of like how those audiophile types who complain about the clipped snare hits in Red Hot Chili Peppers records don't realize that (I'm pretty sure) are intended to sound that way.

If you know they are coming, it's not as jarring. But when they're a surprise, yeah, it's pretty WTF.

Extreme drum gating was still an inexact science at the time, though.

the real misstep is the shirtless with blazer look

sounds fine to me.

Ron Nevison built Ronnie Lane's mobile studio, which was used as the control room for Quadrophenia, which Nevison engineered, parked outside the church John Entwistle bought as the Who's studio. Not that it's easy to mike Keith Moon's kit (Glyn Johns was the only person who could, apparently), but Nevison couldn't really capture the liveliness of Moon's sound like Johns could; the drums on that record are totally out of proportion to how/what Moon orchestrated (except for "Is It In My Head" and "Love Reign O'er Me," which Johns engineered).

It sounds like, on the Heart record, Nevison just went with electronic drums to forego the supposed ass-pain of miking toms. Rototoms were the previous preferred substitute (Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Van Halen's 1984), and then those Simmons dealies started to crop up (Heart, Van Halen's 5150). I wouldn't have guessed that miking regular toms was such an ordeal that producers and engineers would resort to such suckery.

And why is that conservative political commentator doing magic on a soundstage?

Yeah, no mystery there. Those are not drums. Those are synth drums. You can see them in the video.

Well remember, just cuz they are in the video, it doesn't mean they were used for the recording...
But..
In the early 80s, it was very common practice to use electronic drums on records cuz it was easier to control bleed between drums and cymbals.. The problem here, is that it sounds like its clipping due to two or more pads getting struck at the same time and there not being enough room for the signal..

haha this is the kind of thread that makes me love ILM. minutiae!