 Hello and welcome to the drum history podcast. I'm your host Bart van der Zee and today I am very happy to have my old friend Mr. JP tack on the show Jay. Welcome. Oh, thanks Bart I'm happy to be here. Yes, and when I say old friend, I really really mean I'm old I don't mean like that. I mean we have known each other. I think it was 2011 I started interning at sound images where you worked for a very very long time is a very prolific audio engineer, which we'll get into all this stuff. But let me just say up front, the topic we're talking about here today is going to be a little bit broad about the history of recording, but really we're going to try and hone in on the history of recording drums as much as we can. And we'll have a bunch of cool stuff along the way. So again, Jay, yeah, so like I said, we have known each other for what is that now like 13 years or something like that. So yeah, just tell people real quick. I mean, you you worked on we have a shared experience that it's kind of unique with the dialogue replacement recording that we at sound images did a lot of which you did a ton of. Yeah, well the last ADR session I did was with you and it was my first one with Colin Farrell for Fantastic Beasts and where to find them. And that was, you know, every everything we recorded ended up in the film. It was Colin Farrell, you know, morphs later in the film morphs into Johnny Dapp. But but all of his scenes we did a line for that. So that's kind of cool. Yeah, that was that was my first I haven't talked about it on the show in a while because sound images has ceased to exist. And then it was Gwyn sound where I worked and you would still come in and do sessions and now it's play audio agency. But that was my first ADR session and I went on to do about 20 of them over over, you know, there was like, but it's funny because you would record five minutes of like a session and it would be in like arrested development, the TV show or something. It was it's a very unique kind of subcategory of audio audio engineering where you're looping lines, basically. Yeah, a good friend of mine who actually I the first ADR he ever did I did with him. Greg Crawford, he's done over 1000 credits now. He's out of a smart post Atlanta. And he's probably done more ADR than anybody in Hollywood, you know, because they have crews and he's the he's the main guy there. But I can remember it was like, oh, in the 1970s, it was a we were replacing the voice it was a Japanese kind of puppet animation thing that we were doing in English. And it was it was kind of cool. Yeah, that is cool. I mean, but again, and we'll get into it here. But for me to come into the studio as an intern and spend time with you, who truly I think you're one of the nicest people I've ever met. And then it was just such a nice thing. And then when I worked there, it was okay, now, I guess what, you're working in a movie with Colin Farrell. And I assisted you. It was like, this is crazy. I mean, some of the most nerve wracking experiences I've ever had would be the night before you record stuff for a movie where I'm like, freaking out. But then it was always fine. Yeah, it's always fun. I spent a lot of time, you know, trying to pre produce a thing so that nothing could go wrong. And something always went wrong. They got they're happy usually when they ended up. So yes, we had a great time. But before we start, let me tell people if you watched the last one, we're now we're splitting episodes out every two weeks temporarily, because I am up in my attic that is being renovated. I probably sound a little bit echo echo we are because there's not all this Christmas piles of stuff up in here. It's turning into a new studio, which will be awesome. And I'm happy to say today is my birthday. And happy birthday. Thank you, Jay. And I couldn't be happier to be here with you on my birthday. It's absolutely perfect. So anyway, let's jump into this. Jay, you are audio engineer, professor, but truly a historian of many, many different audio and music related things, a Renaissance man across the board. But let's jump in here, Jay. The question up front is let's talk about the earliest, you know, recordings of drumming. And maybe that involves kind of the conversation of the earliest recordings to preface that. Well, Edison Edison, you know, kind of ripped off Leon Scott to Martinville's phone autograph that he Leon Scott did that back before the Civil War, but Edison basically copied that design and took credit for it and did the photograph. But Edison was like, it's like those Justin Long, John Hodgman commercials where I'm a Mac, I'm a PC. Edison was all business and Edison did not see music. It wasn't even on his radar to do music. He was he was going to do, you know, dictaphone type things. And it wasn't until 1889 two guys, Lewis Glass and William Arnold took a took one of Edison's disc players and played a disc kind of like this. This was a, you know, like it's a bakelite or bottom with what they made them out of. But they're very fragile and made a jukebox. They called Nickelodeon and they put it in a hotel in San Francisco called the Palais Royale Saloon. And they left it for six months and, you know, cost the nickel and you could drop a nickel in and crank it up and you could hear a song and it was cool. And and they generated like a thousand bucks, which doesn't seem like a lot. But in 18 or in 1889, that was probably like, you know, some serious money. So people realized, oh, gee, you know, maybe maybe recording music might be something that we could do. Yeah. So other people started doing that. A meal of a liner who kind of invented the first microphone and he actually licensed it to Alexander Graham Bell for his telephone. He and a guy named Elders Johnson started Victor talking machine company and they made flat disks as opposed to cylinders. Edison was a cylinder guy. Edison said, well, you know, it's going to be better if we do a cylinder because the cylinder spins at the same rate all the way through where a disk, you know, it is spinning at the same speed, but toward the outside, it's moving faster than on the inside. All that that's kind of it's kind of a move point because there were not much high frequency on the disks back then anyway. But let me let me ask you before we move forward. Emil, what was his last name? Berliner. He was he was a German born by America. He's an American citizen and he started Victor talking machine company, which is like RCA Victor today. Yes. And there was a I did an episode two or three years ago, I did a short lived series that was like reading historical newspaper articles that were related to drums. And Emil Berliner Berliner Berliner did a he had an early microphone that was inside of a toy drum as the resonator. So drum related, you know, worth mentioning. To your point about you know, how how drummers were recorded, you know, in the early days of recording, when somebody figured out, yeah, we can people might actually pay to hear recorded music. What a concept. They would get everybody in a room, you know, no overdubs. Everybody was sitting in a room, and they would, you know, rehearse the song and then record it in one take, you know, they, they mixed it by by like, okay, you're too loud, move farther away, you're not loud enough, move closer, positioning. Yes. You know, instead of moving faders, they were moving people around in the room. And drums are always probably at the very, very, very back of the room, probably under, you know, under blankets and stuff. But they actually migrated to electrical recording. That was the Western Electric development in 1925. They, they figured out, okay, we can make discs, you know, with microphones. But they, they, for the most part, they just replaced a single horn with a single microphone. So they did the same thing. They said, oh, you're too loud, move farther away, you're not allowed enough move closer. You know, interesting story that the the guitar pick was kind of an invention of, I don't know, somebody I had it before him, but Nick Lucas was the guy who's kind of credited with that. And he, you know, people used to play guitar with their fingers. And it wasn't really loud enough to record. So he came out and he started playing with a pick. It's like, oh, yeah, we can hear it now. So, you know, all these things were because of recording. What happened then? Everything was 78. And actually, 78 were like, it's 78.26. It's not actually 78, but everybody just called it 78. The reason they, they arrived at that was that they could get a song about a five minute song on a cylinder. And that worked. And then they use that speed for discs. And of course, these are these are 70, 78s. I was going to show, show the group. This is why they call it an album, because it can only get one song per side, you know, so if you wanted a bunch of songs, you would bind them together in what look like a photo album, like that. And so the term is still around today, somebody makes a CD and they call it an album. But that's that's why I think people have seen those you see those at like, I don't want to say like a garage sale or your grandma's house or something like that. I got my mom's house. Yes, that's where I got it too. So you know, what's interesting to think about is like, because we're going to get into like, in the future, like people think of like the Beatles recording on like a four track. Yes. At this point, we're really recording on like a one track, because it's going in the horn and it's it's the needle, basically, there was making the master. No, no editing, no mixing. Basically, the engineer listened to the horn or the microphone and said, well, you know, electrical or they could be in a control room then. But but in the old days, they would listen right at the microphone at the horn and say, okay, it's good. Am I am I ready? They would they would drop the needle, cue the band. When the band finishes, it would spiral once or twice. He lifted the needle off and that was the record that was it. They couldn't even play the record back, because a steel needle would would, you know, etch the material. Prior to 1934, it was just aluminum. It was like a bare aluminum disc. After 1934, they started coating them with acetate, which is the kind of way they do it now. Bucky Herzog, who I used to work for years ago, was telling me that if there was a question like, did I sing the wrong word in the second verse? Or did I come in early on the on the bridge or whatever, they could take like a cactus needle, which was very, very low res playback, but it was non abrasive. And so they could, they could kind of hear, oh, yeah, I think I said the right word. So so that was good. That wouldn't destroy the disc. Wow. Would they then be able to re record over things? Or would they just have to toss the disc and start over? Oh, yeah, what's the disc? It's it's it's like a CD. What, you know, what's the what's the group's direction? It's it's toast, you know, got it. Got it. Now, is there information that we know? I mean, if we're thinking early late 1800s, early 1900s with hundreds with drummers, I mean, it was probably someone just kind of on a snare drum. Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to think of when double drumming with the having one guy having a bass drum and a snare, it was probably pretty minimal as far as drummers. Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not, you know, that I can't be sure of whether they actually had a, you know, like a full Susan marching band in there with with with with, you know, a whole drum rank and everything. But drums were drums were always a problem because they were they were loud, you know, Tom doubt was one of the proponents of multiple mics and close miking. He kind of he and Les Paul kind of went against the grain of everybody else that were like, you know, let's get everybody room, put up one mic and find the sweet spot. And that's where you stick the mic and everything's good. You know, he he said, you know, there's no way that that an acoustic bass is going to be louder than a drummer. There's no way that that's, you know, acoustic bass is going to be louder than a trumpet. You know, so he he thought, you know, if you could use several mics. And by the way, Tom doubt is kind of the father of the modern recording console too, because prior to him, recording consoles just had like the big knobs, you know, they didn't have faders sliding faders. And he was the one who said, let's let's put sliding faders on this so you can actually play with your with all 10 fingers as opposed to just two hands. Yeah. The knobs are cool looking. I love I love seeing the knobs. They're really cool. And it kind of looks like old school. It's a sign of the times. But all right. So then where do we go from there? So we went from the cylinders to now like, you know, the album, the record albums with the one needle burning it in the horn. Yeah. Yeah. So so in 1925, they started recording electrically. And like I said, initially, most of the people still did it exactly the way they did it prior to that, except they were just replaced the horn with a microphone. And so those were, you know, all 78s. Once one song per side. It wasn't until a year later, 1926, when Western Electric developed a sound for film, they called it Vitaphone. And they decided since we don't have to make it backward compatible, we can do a 33 and a third now disc. And it had to be that because they had to fit like an entire reel of film on one disc, you know, inside of one disc. And that was that first Vitaphone film. I've talked about this on the show before, but people think jazz singer a lot in 1927. Don Juan. Yeah, the year earlier. Jazz singer was in 27 and then Lights of New York was in 28. And that was a full talkie that had dialogue. But 26 was Don Juan with sound for picture for music because that's like kind of the it doesn't get the credit that maybe I've seen both. I've seen those pictures now, you know, and they're online and you can you can actually view them. And you know, Don Juan's kind of like a music video where and so is so is jazz singer. Yeah, that was Vitaphone. And of course, then they went after that they started going into single system things like photo phone, which was Alexander Graham Bell. Alexander Graham Bell and the first wireless phone, too. And that was that with the system used for photo phone. And they still they still kind of use it, although, well, they don't really because they don't they don't project on film anymore. I don't think any theater is using film. They're all done digital digital. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, when they started moving to tape, tape was actually invented. The concept of tape was goes back to the 1800s. The guy named Valdemar Polson, who was a Danish physicist, and he had he had magnetic tape recorders, but it's kind of like a bandsaw without any teeth, you know, and it moved really quickly, like 60 IPS. And if it broke, it would swirl around the room, decapitate everybody heard that. Yeah, maybe that I think that goes around school. Like I remember being in school, people like, Yeah, I got decapitated. Or it's like that story that just lives on forever. The Blatner phone and all these things. But but there was a guy named Fritz Floimer, who is an Austrian who developed the first magnetic tape recorder back in 1928. And it was commercially produced AEG, which was a German company kind of like RGE, the consumer electronics, whatever. They licensed it, he licensed it to them. And so it was all over Germany. And for some reason, the United States didn't know about it. You know, it was like, it wasn't like, I know we're about to go to war with Germany. But but it wasn't like, you know, at the time that happened, we weren't at war with Germany, but nobody knew about it. And so a guy named Jack Mullen, brought a tape recorder back to the United States after World War II. He was a signal operator and he kind of appropriate went into a radio station and just stole two machines from. So I'm taking these back with me. And he kind of modified him, kind of changed his speed and changed a few things on him, but but made it like the Ampex 200. And his idea was to use it in movies, you know, for movie dialogue, because they were still recording movie dialogue with with basically optical film recorders at that time. And but Bing Crosby's producers said, oh, this is this would be good for us because we have to do a radio show at nine o'clock and then we have to do it again 11 for the West Coast, you know. So so they thought, see if we can just pre-record it, it'd be great. You know, so that's what they did. So a much more. And I've heard that again, I'm going back to I remember hearing that in school. But so it was again, to like restate that a soldier for all for without all the details soldier was in Germany took two tape machines that they were using in Germany from a radio station over there because they had the technology brings it back. That's a higher quality way to record how many tracks would they be able to record then one per it's my it's full track full track model machine. OK, so so each so then they had they had two of them. So I guess he could do one and one, right? He I don't know. If or they just did one. He was he was developing one machine and I'm not sure if he was cannibalizing parts, you know, I'm not sure that he also came back with the big issue with the one in Germany was that actually not so much the machine, but it was the tape, you know, instead of using this metal wire metal, you know, ribbon, but they were using Fritz Flomer had a business where he put the like metallic stripes on cigarettes. So he knew how to coat paper with with oxide metal. Yeah, yeah. And so so the first tape was it was like I.G. Farben, you know, paper tape. And so that's what they were using. And it was I don't think it was until probably the mid fifties or early sixties that they started actually making out of plastic, you know, it was the way tape is they are acetate or some, you know, polyester type. Gotcha. But now, how does that relate to OK, so moving forward, then they have that technology again, it's usually brought in for like movies or radio. Bing Crosby is involved who Bing Crosby was a pretty talented. He could he could hit the skins, you know, like the film. I think it's Easter Parade where he does like a whole thing going through a shop playing drums. But how does that relate to reporting drums and let's Paul, let's Paul work for Bing Crosby. So Bing Crosby became became a distributor for Ampex and gave us Paul his first his first actual tape machine that he that he used and let's Paul modified it, put an extra head on there so he could do sound on sound internally. And he he recorded most of the stuff he recorded though he recorded home and the drums were him doing drum licks on the guitar. Yeah. But when when they first start be using first are using tape for bands they were, you know, again, I'm sure there are a lot of stuff was recorded in one tape. But when they got to track machines, they started splitting it out. The first time I was ever in a recording studio was probably 1965. I was, you know, high school we made a record, you know, and the way they did it, they had it was kind of like a Les Paul technique where they didn't have multi track, they had two two track machines. And so we recorded the first track to one machine, then they would play that back and read over Dubb as they bounced to the second machine. They recorded it's kind of where they put the bass and the kick drum on one track, everything else on the other. They weren't considered, you know, weren't considered by stereo, but they would keep those those that track configuration. And then if you're adding more guitars and more keys and more whatever, that will get mixed together with with everything else with the drums and the previously recorded keys and whatever. If you started doing vocals and they would take those two tracks and mix that together in mono and then do the vocals on the other track. And so got it. That's kind of just layering and layering and layering, but you're basically not able to you can't really undo your first layer. No, no, no, it's it's kind of what do they call it like ping pong recording your balance. Yeah, exactly. You're going. Yeah. And it was a little bit easier, a little bit safer than Les Paul. When Les Paul did it, he did it on one machine. And literally when he hit the record button, he was erasing everything he had done, but he was picking it up upstream and mixing it. But if he had screwed up after 20 takes, you know, 20 layers, he had to start all over again. We had the advantage of well, okay, I messed it up, take it back to tape up and we could we could do another because the tape we just recorded was not being erased. It was being played back now. Well, and I think I want to mention that I don't think it's it's something to really get into heavily today. But I think if people are listening and they're interested in this, going down the rabbit hole about Les Paul and like how high the moon and like these his his involvement in the history of recording is really a fun thing to look into. So I will just let people know that you should really check out Les Paul as far as his techniques. Yeah, he's that's really yeah, he's the father of multitrack. I mean, any any app any, you know, you know, here's here's a quick story about Les Paul. He came up with the idea of how to do a multitrack machine that you could you could actually overdub on. They had they had multitrack machines that that you couldn't overdub on as early as 1951. But he approached several different tape recorder companies. Nobody was interested in it. They thought it was like nobody wants to overdub except Les Paul. So we don't, you know, we don't really care. Les Paul paid Ampex $50,000. He told him exactly how to do it. They built it for him. And he didn't get any royalties. I mean, as soon as he got to the machine, everybody said, oh, yeah, that's pretty cool. I want one too. And Ampex sold like a bazillion of these. And and Les Paul got nothing from it. So he's he's terribly overlooked. I mean, he's done more for sound, I think, than just about anybody other than Edison and whatever. But anyway, when we started getting into multitrack now, like where we could overdub, like on four track, basically, they still pretty much recorded that same way. They put like the kick in the bass on one track, everybody else on the track, and then the other two tracks were overdub vocals and other stuff. It wasn't until they got to like a track where they said, OK, now we got enough tracks and we can put the drums by themselves. Maybe I've seen some eight track track sheets where they sell the drum and bass drum together, or the kick drum and bass together and then the drums on their own. But most of the time that you had drums, bass guitar, you know, so you had enough stuff to do that. When you got the 16 track, the two inch 16 track, then drums usually got split out into a bass, snare and overhead, you know, like they call it kit. But it was like Tom symbols, you know, just single overhead mic or single overhead track. Maybe they had multiple mics, but it was all mixed to one track. When they went to 24 track, then it was generally like bass, bass drum, snare, drum, stereo, either stereo overhead or bass drum, snare, drum, toms and cymbals, you know, how you want to split out. And of course, if you had, you know, if you weren't going to put a lot of other stuff on the on the, you know, the recording, you could have the drums on like spread away tracks, you can have a track for the hat. But you know, it just depended on what you know, what you were going to be doing later on to do that. Yeah, well, I mean, that's that's the good the great question here that you just you kind of alluded to it. But really, so if you have a four track and you want to have your drums be one of the tracks, I know you would probably combine them with a four track, but you would just mainly have like, would you use multiple mics and then sum them down to one track? Generally, yes. They have they was done in studio. So they had dead mixers. And, you know, what was always I was always so impressed with the mixers back then, because they they were often mixing stuff that they they couldn't hear, you know, they would ask, okay, what are you going to be adding to this? And we tell them at the beginning of session, oh, can I maybe have some some brass come in? And and so that that was in their mind when they were mixing it and they would mix it slightly differently, depending on what they knew was coming up, even though they couldn't hear it, you know, because it wasn't it hadn't been added yet. Yeah. Yeah, really, though. OK, so I get it, though. So you have your, let's say three drum mics or whatever into a mixer and then the output of the mixer would be into one of your tracks, which then could be ping pong bounced down on top. And then and then you have the generational loss. Yes. Yes. That's somebody people, you know, today don't even think about because digital, you can know, keep making clones and copies. But every time you you rerecorded something, it was worse. You know, it was like 3DV but worse than noise. And you had any any issue with the tape in the recording, you had it actually made it worse. So, you know, Les Paul, to his credit, you know, he did he was using full track tape and one machine, I guess, maybe because it was all internal and didn't have to run cables all over the house there. His stuff sounded pretty good even after that many overdubs. But normally you know, if you overdub it like, you know, eight or ten times, you're gonna hear, you know, all kinds of tape. Well, it's the it's the like I think you maybe you or a teacher said something to me about it's the it's the making, you know, you take a piece of paper and you make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. It gets less. Yes. Clear each time. And that's what happens there. But yeah, nowadays you don't we don't know the, you know, the world of that. But one thing you mentioned to with the drum mics is it's been mentioned in previous episodes. But I know I think John Bonham, I don't want to open the can of worms about John Bonham's recording because there's a lot of passionate people that I believe there was a overhead it'd be like a single overhead that was getting the snare and it would be like a shotgun mic above them to get the snare. It was just a really interesting setup and different technique back then for drum mics. I had read some years ago in one of the trademags, like three Grammy winning engineers. So they're all good. One of them said, you know, I only use three mics. I have a mic on the kick, a mic on the snare and a mic overhead because I don't want to have resonances out of phase mics. Another guy who also won Grammy said, oh, I use two mics on the snare and a mic for every every time. And I'm like, you know, so he wants just the opposite. And both approaches can work if you know what you're doing, really, you know, one of the issues we had recording drums, especially when we were, you know, trying to get a good, you know, tight drum sounds often when you do extra mics, I have mics on the tom so that they're in all those tom licks sound great. You're hearing you're hearing like resonances and bleed from the kick and snare, you know, in the toms. And one thing we used to do not not that often, but sometimes we would go into and, you know, on the on the tom tracks and we would pick a grease pencil. OK, here's where the lick ends. Here's where it starts again. We would defeat the bias on the record head. We would defeat the pinch roller and we would kind of wind it by hand to kind of spot a race in between. So silence, you know, once you had automation, you could just kind of mute it in those places. But before automation, you had to, you know, go to stupid things like that. Well, that's but that's a that's a level of because my experience with tape would be what at sound images was doing tape transfers for people. And it was like just even that little bit of like, I mean, even when I started, I would be doing like interviews where I would be connecting people and it would be like like ISDN calls and I would be running down the hall of the machine room to like turn off the phone because you get this horrible loud. So I'd be running down to turn it off every. It gets easier and easier and easier every decade. And that was in 2012. Yeah. So. Well, the other thing that made drums more manageable were gates. You know, we got gates on the toms and toms are great things to gate because they're either really loud or they're kind of off, you know, they don't they don't sustain that long usually. And so we would put gates on the toms. So those mics were basically shut down unless it, you know, the player hit them and then they would come on. You know, by the way, the story about gates, you know, the one reason my astronauts would go like Houston, we have a problem. So their mics were gated and they would do the odd to turn the wake the mic up. Really? Yeah. That's the story I heard. I think it's true. But well, that but it became like a like a trope of like we've got a problem or. And it even seems like pilots do that too. I wonder. It might it might be the same issue. Yeah, they might have to wake up to think. So I think we're at the point talking about we're getting into the mult, we're adding adding tracks for recording. We kind of know now we're getting more. What before I ask the next question, what year, what decade are we in right now that we're talking about with having eight tracks? Let's say that. Well, OK, eight tracks. 70s, 1970s, eight tracks were kind of big. That was less Paul's original machine. OK. In 19 he got the apex eight track in 1956, but it didn't arrive the rest of the world for a few years. I mean, Tom Dowd got the second one and then everybody else said, oh, that's pretty cool. And they got them after that 16 track was, you know, late late 70s, 80s, 24 track. There's still studios using tape, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, that they believe in tape or tape even was stopped being made for a while. But there's still studios now that that that love tape. Four track would have been 60s. Yeah. Yeah. OK. In fact, the Beatles Beatles the Beatles four track was actually a one inch four track. It was not a half inch. And that's why it sounded so good. It was it was like really, you know, the thicker the wider the tracks, the better the signal of the noise. So it was because the more headroom you have. Yes. Right. Yes. OK. Headroom and just the more signal you could put on the tape. So you were talking about gates. And while we're in this kind of like 50s, 60s, 70s, like let's go to whenever 50s, 60s. When did they start applying like, let's say, on the drums, like using a reverb on a snare? Like what was when did effects on recordings come into drums and beyond? Well, here's the here's the thing back then. And I've you know, I've kind of remixed the Beatles tracks to, you know, you can download those from the Internet. You had to kind of record that way. You had to make that commitment. OK, I want I want. It's not like an afterthought. Like we're in the final mix now. I'm going to add reverb to the snare. It was like, OK, we're recording now. I think it's the snare would sound really cool with reverb, you know, it's like it's printed. Yeah. I know if you think like that bridge over troubled waters where they had the elevator shaft, you know, reverb on that on the drum. But yeah, that's the way it was with the Beatles, too. All most of the reverb you in fact, all the reverb that you hear on their records, that was actually on the multi track stems. They did no no program limiting. It was like there was a lot of limiting going on, but it was all on each one of the stems because I can take the four tracks and I can mix it. It sounds just like the record. I mean, it's not like there's no mastering guy involved. He's just like, well, that's what it sounded like. And they just made it that way. And it would be an but it's like incredible tube like outboard gear that's like now worth thousands and thousands of dollars, I'm sure. Like here's here's a reverb story. The studio where I first recorded years ago was a converted house, but it was a nice studio. They had really nice console and everything. They used the garage in the back as a echo chamber. They didn't have, you know, the digital echoes weren't around. I mean, you know, there were probably plate reverbs and spring reverbs, but they had this this garage that they kind of sealed up and put it like an omen mic and a speaker. And that was their echo chamber. When we recorded in the daytime, usually no problem at night, somebody and they're recording with the reverb and somebody said, wait a minute, I'm hearing crickets. They would have to go out with a raid and search and destroy and kill all the crickets, you know, in the reverb. Yeah. The other thing that I noticed about about the the drums is is how the sound of that, you know, the sound of the drums makes such a big impact on everything else. You know, it's like strength up the middle, you know, we had this kid. Let me tell you about this kid. A friend of mine sold me a kit for the studio. This was back before sound images where my previous gig at AudioCraft and it had a 34 inch bass drum, 34 inch bass drum. The floor toms were 26 and 28 floor toms. The rack toms were, I think, I know, 22, 24. It was just it was like made for guys. It was a Ludwig kit, but it was made for Godzilla. OK, yeah, it's like clown size. Yeah. And so, you know, we tried everything to get it to sound good. You know, we tried different heads and taking bottom heads off, bottom heads on and never really sounded very good. So finally, we gave you said, OK, this is we're not we're not going to do this anymore. We got, you know, a normal human size kit from and the players came in. We had the same players come in to do the A-list players every every week to do jingles usually two or three times a week, you know, guitar, bass, piano, bass, guitar drums, and we did a take. And so we got one when they came in to listen to it. And and everybody came up to me one at a time like the guitar player said, what you do to the sound of my guitar? It sounds really good. The bass player said, did you change something on the bass? The bass has never sounded that good before. The the piano player said, you got a new piano tutor. I mean, the piano just really pops. And none of that happened. And we just got a new set of drums and everything in context sounded much better. Yeah, I mean, you you say you're not a drummer, but you know a ton about this. But I mean, from your experience in engineering, I mean, do you think that's the kit? Do you think it's the player? Do you think it's the mic? Is it a mix of everything? It's both. But that situation, we had the same mics. Of course, they were closer because we could get closer because the kit wasn't so big. But I had another I had situation where again, we have the new kit now, the smaller kit. And I've got I you know, I'm still not getting the drum sound I really want. There's another producer in town that I really like his his the drum sound just really pops on his stuff. So I I hired his drummer for a session and we didn't change anything. You know, the same kit, same mic, same position. And suddenly there's the sounds like, you know, so the way you play the drums out, you know, because you're a drummer and you know that the way you play the drums makes a big deal. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the without going on that rabbit hole too. But like people would be chasing Tony Williams drum sound. But then his ride. But then people realized, oh, it's him. Is the big thing. But so while we're in this kind of era of like, you know, I think the history of it really early, it's kind of like like when I think of history of recording drums, it seems like fifties to seventies and eighties. It's really like evolving a lot. And after that, it kind of, you know, nineties things change, but it it's it's more standardized after that. But the question is, and I'm looking at your list of really good topics you sent me, but drum booths, drum alcoves, center of the room. Yeah, let's talk about the history and evolution of how where they were recorded. Yeah, well, that was again, that goes back to Tom Dowd. He was one of the first people to to actually think of using a drum booth or drum alcove to kind of isolate the drums a little bit better. At the studio, we did have a drum booth and what we did often, though, is put the we put the guitar amp in the drum booth and we'd cover up the piano with a real heavy packing blanket. We'd put like PCM mics on the underside of the piano lid, cover the piano and the drums could be like literally next to the piano and we weren't getting much bleed either way with that. But the booth, whenever we did like a big a big band session where we had, you know, trumpets and trombones and saxes and everything, we would put the drums in the booth because otherwise the drums would get in every mic if they're out in the room. Then there's also like the gobo and like the kind of, you know, walls on wheels. And there's the techniques of putting blankets over the bass drum with the microphone. I mean, I, you know, is there any info that you have on kind of when that sort of even went further? I mean, I guess gobo's and things were around since forever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, Ringo, Ringo's sound and the Beatles, you know, that had that real dead sound where everybody's trying to figure out that it was a really cool sound. And I'm sure there were there were blankets or towels like on on the sea towels. Yeah. Yeah. And and we had gobo's, as you know, at the studio, they were there, you know, kind of thick. We were considering getting those plexiglass type gobo's that I've seen, you know, people use them live. And, you know, that that's kind of cool, too. Another thing that people did back in the 70s, I had on my list of the drum umbrellas. Have you ever seen those? No, I was just looking. I was about to I was about to what the hell is a drum? Yeah, it was it was kind of a it was kind of a big deal in the 70s. A lot of studios were going that it was literally an umbrella over the top of the drums. I sent a picture for it to you. But but the idea was that I don't if it did two things, it it may be reflected back some of the some of the sound or it helped contain the you know, the drum sound from getting out. But some some studios literally had like a big beach umbrella over the over the drums. You know, and I don't know how what do you do about the stick, you know, going down your back or whatever. But it's kind of like in studios there's and that's Kenny Aaron off in the picture you sent. But like, it's kind of like how in rooms there's like a cloud above you, you know, with like, like it makes a lot of sense. It looks kind of a little silly. It's a little like a little crazy. Let's have a big guess. In the studio, I don't think anything kind of I don't think anything's off limits. I think it's like I remember miking up a drum set and we took or forget it might have been guitars, but it was with Adam Pleiman. And it was taking a trash can and putting a 57 in the back of the trash can getting that and blending it in. But that was like that was like 15 drum mics. And that was like number 16. Well, that's in. Yeah, that's one of the nice things about, you know, the digital workstations with lots of inputs, you can you can try all kinds of things and they don't work. Just don't use them. You know, you're not committing, you're not committing to them. But in the old days, they were basically they had to commit to those to those things. You know, the other thing with with drums, too. And and this was an issue with tape. I'm going to tell the students that we always put like either the bass or the kick drum on on the outside tracks. And that was because as the tape, you know, is going over the heads and onto a reel. Sometimes the edges of the the flanges of the reel actually creased or, you know, kind of warped a little bit the tape and the low frequency stuff like the kick drum and the bass didn't weren't affected by that because they're printed so deeply into the tape. But if you put symbols on one of those outside tracks, it sounds like flanging, you know, you'd be, you know. Yeah. I mean, it's a level of thinking about stuff that we don't have to do nowadays. I mean, really, it's interesting to think about that, that it just doesn't it just doesn't come up anymore. But all right. So let's just keep going on the history of so many more questions. Let's just keep going on the history of drum recording. And I think we were at 60s and 70s. So yeah. Well, 70s. I was going to mention 70s. You know, the the signature sound of the 70s by the disco stuff with the the scenario syndromes and the Rototoms, you know, you know, electronic you hear that you hear that and you say, oh, yeah, that's that's that's that's disco. You know, 90s, you know, 80s have their sound too. But 90s, the thing was the gated reverb. I don't know if you're you know, oh, yeah. And we've had track. There was a really cool sound. Everybody liked it. But now it's so dated that like, you know, even 10 years after that, we had some tracks that we were thinking of repurposing. You know, like, oh, just sell this to somebody else. And somebody heard it and say, I don't know, this drums are this drums are too to 90s, you know, to use. But it'll become cool again. Yeah. Like now in the 2024, probably next year, it's like everyone's like, God, I love that gated Tom's. Well, you know, recording insurers have said that about autotune, that autotune is going to date those recordings. Autotune has been around for 30 years and people are still using it. You know, you know, it was invented at Exxon, believe it or not. I don't know if you knew like Exxon. The oil company, Exxon, that company, it was a guy named Andy Hildebrand, and he was using this this program to kind of do seismic research. And he said, well, I can repurpose this for audio. So I think he left and did autotune. But but that's how it started. Wow. So and then another thing kind of going off of this on your list is live versus dead, which is a big topic. I mean, that's that's tiny. I remember even at sound images, we would record in the far room in the live room sometimes with drums, super dead. But then other times it'd be in the main big room, a bigger sound. I mean, talk about that. Well, you know, I'm kind of a fan of dad because he can always add reverb, you know, but like I visited the bamboo room, which was Musper's studio, the guy who he's now in Ecuador, but he was Irwin. Yeah, he he recorded, you know, a ton of hit records, like Death Leopard and stuff. And one of his rooms, it was a it was a fairly small room, but it was for the drums. And it was like, you know, you clap your hands like it sounded like it was a concert hall. So some people like that. I again, I'm a fan of like, you know, you can always you can always add reverb if you want, but you can't take it away as easily. But yeah, it might make the player feel, you know, feel better about playing maybe. There was an episode of where the Foo Fighters were in some studio in I don't know if it was in Chicago somewhere. And the guy said, yeah, I located here because this room had great echo and the drum was going, oh, listen to that. Yeah, I mean, but I'm maybe it's my engineer background, but I'm sort of more on board with everything you're saying where like as a drummer, I'm like, yeah, this is awesome. But then I'm like, as an engineer, you're like, that's kind of hard to control. So I'm sure it's preferences for people. But so OK, now I have a question. Yeah, let's let's let's do this as maybe a quick game. OK, because I see no, I think you can't lose. It's physically impossible to lose. OK, so you wrote how drum sounds can date a recording in a couple words, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and on. So if I say, like, let's say you have to under five words describe the drum sound, not limited to five. OK, really, really, really quick. Just how do you describe it? 50s. How do you describe the drums? Kind of distant, you know, they weren't as present because they, you know, I mean, it's still great that you know, I listen to some of these old recordings and think, wow, you know, that was probably done as a mono recording and it still holds up really well, but it doesn't have the presence. Yeah, 60s. How do you describe tight, a tighter sound? Yeah, I think of the the Beatles, specifically the to tomb, tomb, you know where the drums don't really ring very much. Mike's got closer. Yeah. Yep. OK, 70s. How do you I mean this? I mean, there was other music, obviously in the 70s, except besides disco. But but that's kind of that's kind of what I feel 80s. When you get to 80s, I'm thinking just bigger, bigger sound. You know, it's more theatrical and big toms. Yeah. Yeah. And I saw a lot of them in these episodes I've done and we'll do the 90s too. But in the in the 80s and 90s, they started using under Tom like Sennheiser 421s, like sticking up in these like like power, huge power toms, which again, that would be like Alex van Halen or something where there's a lot of mics to spare. But how do you describe the 90s? Well, again, that we talked about earlier, the the gated gated reverb was really popular that that half second, the quick, you know, delay on the snare was was kind of the signature thing. You think of like the Kenny Loggan stuff and and danger zone, all that stuff was it was like that sound on the drums. But 90s kind of sort of like halfway through, I feel like it was that grunge came in and switched in it. But then you even get like you think of like the spin doctors or something where it became more of like a just very present, I want to say natural sound. But well, you know, grunge kind of that whole grunge thing kind of saved guitars too, because, you know, in the 80s, it was more synth driven bands. There are some bands that the guitar was like almost not there, you know, and then and then when grunge came about, and you know, that kind of rock and roll groups like Creed, you know, as my son's favorite group at one time, you know, and they're huge again. Yeah, and huge now. Yeah. And so that made the guitar popular again. Yeah, it did. Well, then this so the next one getting into though is like 2000s, 2010s, which gets into you have a point here about drum recording in home studios. Yeah. Well, everything changed. Yeah. Everything changed. Well, you know, Billy Eilish recorded all hit records in her bedroom, you know, that's why that's why all the big studios are closing because people say, yeah, I've got this laptop and I can just use that. I was I was, you know, I tell my students that, you know, if you don't want to buy like an eight channel interface to record the drums or anything, you can you can do, you know, a Zoom H4N. I have my H4N too. I love it. I've got I've got a I've got a bunch of these and you've got, you know, two external mics, two internal mics. You can put this for the over you can record four channels once they do this for the overhand, then kick kick and snare, you know, and and you've got, you know, there's your drums. Now, the disadvantage of doing this versus, you know, recording it, everything wants on on on a DAW is that in order to hear playback, you have to kind of put it all together, you know, it's not like you can do an immediate playback. But if everybody felt good about the track, you know, yeah, let's let's put that one together and see what it sounds like. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, you could record in a million dollar studio, you could record on an H4N, what you're recording is the most important thing. And it would sound, if you're an amazing, you know, world class drummer, you probably would record a little better than a beginner drummer. The quality of the plane matters a lot. But yeah. Okay, so so that's that's good. And that takes us up to today, basically. I mean, what do you see happening now and in the future of recording? I mean, you're you're a professor, you're teaching an electronic media class, basically, or did they even call it electronic media anymore? They changed it to applied media communications. It used to be electronic, electronic media, and they thought the name electronic media sounded a bit dated. But that's what I went to school with. I mean, it's yeah, but I guess it is. So anyway, what do you see happening in the future for let's say drums, music, audio, dialogue, you know, we haven't even talked about like the, the electronic drums too, you know, but my yeah, my youngest grandson has a kit of I know, I don't have his V drums or not, but it's it's an electronic kit. And I that's a great idea for the parents because he could whack on those things all day long and they don't hear a thing. Yeah. But I know I was reading Adrian Blue, you know, who's he's actually a drummer, too, in addition to being a world class guitar player. And he was talking about playing with playing with a trio with Robert Fripp in Africa, who the bass player was, but he was playing the drums. He said, it's really easy. I just I do the mix and just send him a stereo mix of what I got to the to the front house. And there you go. Wow. Wow. Yeah. I mean, the hit and there's a whole episode that's the history of the electronic drums with Justin Greenewalt, which I'll tell people he's 65 drums on YouTube. So he did a whole episode on that, which is really, really cool. But that is and then there's a Simmons drum episode. But when you were engineering, I mean, you saw Simmons and things come in. Yeah. What did you think of that? Well, was you had they had those in the MIDI room and we had we had triggers, you know, I go back to even the Lindrum, which was was predates MIDI MIDI went around till 1983. The Lindrum was out in 1982. And every studio had a Lindrum. And it was only eight bit. I think the session and Lynn was actually a guitar player, believe it not Roger Lynn, but but they think the the drummer was Art Wood, who was an L.A. session drummer. And he just I guess he did all the hits. Yeah, the Lindrum is today, if we heard him, we say, really, you know, it's like a Baldwin fun machine. But back then it was just so much better than anything else. We thought, well, this sounds pretty good, you know. So Jay, looking at your list here, a couple things that are that are big topics. But I mean, I they're awesome and they need to be talked about. Let's talk about microphones with recording drums through history. I know in your list, you have dynamic versus condenser versus ribbon and then cardioid versus omni mic patterns on drums. What's let's talk about? Yeah, they typically when you think about it, most most drums actually the actual drums probably do well with dynamic mics because they they you know, they can capture the power that they're higher inertia microphones. Most most that you know, like the kick drum mics, the good ones are dynamic. And but you know, when you're picking up the symbols and you know, which the the idiophone type traps, those do much better with condenser mics, because they're they're lower inertia, they, you know, they'll pick up the the transient when you hit the symbol with the stick, they they, you know, pick that up a little bit better than than up. Sure. I mean, you could get it with a dynamic microphone as well. But but generally, condenser mics do much better for that, whereas the dynamic mics do better on the drums. So well, that'd be like your snare is a 57 and your overhead is a U 87 or something. And you know, when Adam used to do it at the studio, too, he would he would use probably both you would put he put a 57 on the snare that for the underside to pick up the stairs, he'd use like a 414 condenser mic. That's that just takes me back because like every every other day, I'd be I just do my formula of like, it was like 13 mics. It was this and this and this. Yeah. Yeah. And as far as as far as Omni versus Cardioid, typically most of the microphones we use for Omni, excuse me, were Cardioid because Cardioid comes with, you know, the word heart like cardiology or cardiovascular. It means it's heart shaped pattern and meaning it picks up in one direction. So you want to aim them aim the mic at what you want to pick up. You want to aim it at the snare drum or aim it at the tom. But there are cases where actually I think overhead, sometimes the Omni sounded better. The Omni pattern where it's picking up all around, you know, the room even above the symbols. I know, orchestral recording, Omni mics are used almost exclusively that they use very few Cardioid mics. They like the famous Dekka tree that they've used for, you know, since the the fifties or something. It's like a triangular tree with the three mics there. Those are all Omni directional microphones. I would do Omni for like we'd have classical pianists come in and it would be a it would be like you 87s and they'd be on Omni and it would be, you know, there's you're not really punching. It would be just a clean take and then maybe one or two. But those were intense sessions of very good players. But all right. And then into we have all the recording, we have the microphones and then leading into the mixing of it. Yes. How does that work? Well, I always tell my students, you know, it kind of depends on the ensemble. But if you have a typical piano based drums, a singer type ensemble, there's nothing much in that high range. You know, think of a guitar is kind of almost in the cello range. So it's slow for you can get way up on the neck too. But but you know, most of power chords are down low. So you don't have a lot of high stuff except for the symbols in the drums. So make sure you feel those last two octaves, you know, from 5k up to 20k with with some symbols, otherwise it's going to sound like a AM radio type mix. Sometimes I think it comes down to what the the monitors speakers that you're mixing on and the headphones where if you can't hear it, you think it doesn't matter. But you think it would you say it adds like a nice brightness to the mix? Yeah, here's kind of a short story. You know, the theme from Shaft was recorded at Staxon Memphis, which is converted. I visited there a few years ago. But the engineer who mixed it actually came from Arden, which is another studio in Memphis, and their monitors were were much brighter than the than the ones at Staxon. And so, you know, this theme from Shaft starts out as almost Siblin hi hat. Yeah, and everybody immediately everybody perks up when they heard that and they credit that for almost making it a hit, you know, because it's like, well, then so I've redone that. Well, it was a hit. So no, you know, yeah, no. But but yeah, if like I said, the drums affects the sound of everything in the mix. And if you can, you know, don't forget those top two octaves because the cymbals might be the only thing filling that out. If you can hear that suddenly, it sounds really high five. You can you're hearing way, way up high now, you know. Yeah. Yeah. I think engineering and recording and recording drums in general. But but again, be like, I'm a lifelong drummer, but I found a lot of my I mean, I still work in pro tools every day and some capacity for video. I do a lot of mixing for video and YouTube for other people. But like for people who are audio engineers, let's say drummers or or whatever, audio engineering mixing things can be very daunting and it's just like there's a lot and hearing you talk about it sometimes of the way tape was, it's just a lot. But I will say what I learned from you going back to day one of interning Bootsy, I think came in and we recorded something with Bootsy for the first day. That's cool. But it was it, you had a way of like simplifying things where and I love working with Adam as well, but he would have like our ADR sessions with him would be 50 tracks prepared everything was templated. It was beautiful. But I remember doing a fantastic beasts with you. And I think you had it boiled down to like four tracks. I had I might have been six, you know, six, but it was very clean. But I thought about that, you know, in these ADR sessions, sometimes you'll have like a dialogue coach. You have the director and all these people have to be heard. Then of course, you have the production dialogue and the production stuff. And then of course, the actor, the boom in the loft. So yeah, I might have been like six, six tracks or so. But yeah, it sometimes Adam stuff, you know, he was prepared for everything. And sometimes when I do that template, it'd be like, where am I? But again, both are right. And his mind works better. And again, we're he's amazing. Yeah, he's he's unbelievable. He's one of the most knowledgeable guys you and you and Adam are incredible. But but you guys would have this and I learned from you to just simplify things. And I think that applies to people who are, you know, whatever, if you're starting a podcast, if you're recording drums, just like, like, I don't think I really, as far as my voice on here, I never really add too much EQ, I cut a lot. And then I boost a boost when I need. But you you, you kind of learn from audio engineering with drumming and things like you think, add, add, add. I learned more about like take things away, simplify it. And I think I credit a lot of that to you. Yeah, there's a there's usually some tubbiness around to, you know, somewhere between two and 300 Hertz that if you take a little bit of that out, suddenly, it makes it you know, it sounds it sounds clear, you know, well, like someone's asked me like, in the past, my friend Craig, who does the practicing drummer podcast, he was I was explaining to him, it was like, well, how do you EQ things? And I say, I dip out at one K and I do it. I cut at one K and I cut at 200 Hertz. And then I roll off at like 60. And it's like, that pretty much works it like on most voices and especially mine. But I'm like the really, really, really low stuff on a voice. It's like, it's not really helping. But anyway, I just I learned a lot from you. And I want to say thank you for, you know, teaching me so much. I had no idea. But but thank you too, for yes, for all you've done. Anyway, so Jay, you've got a lot of projects and things that you've done in the past. Is there anything you want to plug as we wrap up? No, not really. Yeah, just the fun of talking. Yeah, no, this is fun. I enjoyed this. And again, happy birthday. Oh, thank you so much. Like I said, perfect way to do it. I'm up here in the attic and I got to take my card table apart and set it and take it back down because they're doing more drywall tomorrow. But on that note, I want to thank everyone for listening to the podcast, watching it on YouTube, sticking with me on on spreading out every two weeks. Now, we'll be back to every week. I know Jay's students are interested in podcasting. And the one thing I will say if any of them listen is after five years, scheduling and balancing it with your life becomes quite the balancing act, especially with three small kids. Absolutely. Yeah. Anyway, Jay, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for being here. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Bart.