Been trying to emulate the raw drum sound of The Strokes in their Is This It? album, but the closest that I’ve come to is this (not at all sure if it’s even close):
(with a little high frequency boost and a bit of reverb via Zoom R4)
I can’t seem to capture that rawness, or dirt? I don’t know. I used BD Classic, SD Classic, CH Classic machines. Looking for machine and settings suggestions to better emulate that drun sound?
Unfortunately, I think that this is going to be rough without involving samples, the syntakt is not known for it’s prowess in emulating acoustic drums recorded in a live room.
The strokes kick drum has way more beater sound and you’ve got what sounds like too much low end on your ST kick. It sounds like your snare isn’t really focused in the right frequency range either. I’d maybe take those first few (strokes) snare drum hits and sample them into your DAW of choice, then analyze the frequency against a recording of your ST snare and that will make it easier to see where you need to add to or subtract from.
That kick needs to come off quieter than you have it but not be silenced by anything else in the mix. The closest you’ll get to hearing the kick soloed out on the strokes song is around 1:40 and you can hear how it still peeks out around the bassline really effectively. It’s just that the sound of an acoustic kit recorded in a live room and mixed against other instruments is not always going to be easy to pin down on a groovebox.
Good luck though! Can definitely get closer with the frequencies, I think, so don’t give up on it.
specifically in the 50 - 150 there’s a lot of difference, but you can further analyze it and check against the reference snare as you go along.
strokes:
syntakt:
and no problem, I hope it helps point you in the right direction.
Their snare has a lot more in the 1000 - 3000 range also, so that’s the places I would start. Don’t go solely on graphic analysis, just using your ears will tell you if something is still wrong.
Your stuff sounds more like a tr606… And The Strokes are everything but that
I would use samples, similar in sound to the ones they recorded, or even to a regular drumset, and then look for info regarding how sound engineers treat recording and processing drums
Wow, it is great to be introduced to this perspective/technique of emulating sounds. I was playing everything by ear all this time. What a total newbie I am.
Mostly this is all you need, but when you want a specific sound sometimes it helps to know a different way to approach the sound… it gives you something where you can see the results in addition to hearing them and at times it might make the difference you need.
Just hearing two bars of that intro is enough to remind me of how much I love this song.
The recording techniques by Gordon Raphael are a giant part of what makes them great which people don’t think about enough as they think it’s just “raw and live”. Nice interview with him about it here: Gordon Raphael: Producing The Strokes
I’ve taken out some of the drum specific bits for you which shows that this stuff is hard work!
I like to set up all the gear before the artist gets in, because when I was paying for a studio with my hard-earned money it really made everybody nervous to just sit there while some clown took two hours to get a kick drum sound. It would put us in a bad mood for the rest of the day, and that’s what you’d get to hear on the tape. That was an important lesson.
When I made the deal with them, I had no idea that a) these guys would be able to perceive so many details, and b) they would hold me responsible for them. You know, ‘Can you brighten the hi-hat in a mix with three mics, and not make the snare pop out?’ Things like that. They really were giving me the treatment. In fact, at the end of the third day I said, ‘I’ve already worked this many hours, and for the deal I gave you that’s all I want to work, so no, I won’t do that!’
They wanted the majority of songs to sound like The Strokes playing live, whereas they wanted a few others to sound like a weird, in-studio production with a drum machine, even though no drum machine was used — it was the drummer playing all the parts. Those songs were done track-by-track and sculpted into non-standard rock sounds. The most notable is ‘Hard To Explain’, and another one is ‘Soma’. I just spent a long time sculpting the drums and processing them so that they sounded like a machine. I was taking real sounds, opening up the plug-in box containing compressors, EQ and amps, and messing around until something real sounded like something fake.
“My background in industrial music played a very large part,” explains Gordon. "What I really enjoyed performing that music was just destroying sounds — taking sounds, disintegrating them and then bringing them back. Often, with the music I was making, a lot of things would run through Rat distortion pedals and overdriving amps or preamps. The sounds that I liked were obviously completely debilitated and messed up, and that was a fun approach. I would destroy things and then orchestrate them so that they were audible. I’d add a lot of elements, so that things were left completely raw. The first time I ever really got to take my own hard-earned money and go into a studio, I remember spending days working on the snare track. I would have six different tracks of snare — one through Rat distortion, one with backwards reverb, one with a top mic — all of these different things that I could mix in and out for variation. I’d route a Hammond organ back through the board, through a Rat distortion pedal and really metallic, ringing flanger, so it’d sound like some weird guitar.
I will definitely be doing that.
