Getting in the Zone

From there, wherever we happened to be recording we were just trying to get the drum sounding as dead as possible. We bought some poles from Bunnings and built ourselves a little drum tent and then bought a whole bunch of doona covers and sheets from Dimmeys and hung that around the drum kit.

Ulrich: Previously, when studio people would talk about the ‘sound of the room’ I’d nod but be unconvinced — I’ve just never had that experience. This album has totally changed my perceptions. We were in six studios by the end of the album and I can instantly pick where we recorded a certain part by the sound of the room. The first one was literally a concrete box but there’s something about that reverb that… we didn’t use.

Al: Here’s another example, the sound of the Panopticon drums was this Airbnb we rented in Forster. That place was mad. It was a double-height space where we erected the drum tent and it was far from perfect but still super-tight. Everything else on that song was recorded in that one space. Like the backing vocals: all the falsetto stuff was shouted from the balcony with a mic on the ground floor.

Ulrich: That recording we had a little Behringer mixer and I think that was mixing the kick, snare and overhead, going into the dbx 165A compressor. That was the drum sound, which is pretty nuts. I don’t think I would have done that later in the recording process! We’re talking about a little Behringer $20 mixer we bought just to get a headphone mix.

SEBATRON VMP-4000E QUAD VALVE PREAMP

PURCHASE PRICE: $1850

Al: The Sebatron Quad Pre was our first significant gear purchase in preparation for this album. A mate of ours had one and it sounded cool. I didn’t know much about preamps at the time and couldn’t pick the sound of a preamp, but this proved to be a really wise choice. It sounds sick.

Ulrich: It’s got these simple EQ switches, which sounds limiting but it means you can’t overthink it and they sound good.

Al: We used it on just about everything. Pretty much all the drums, synths, bass, anytime we went to DI something. It may be crazy to put everything through it but it just sounded so warm and tape-like. We tried other preamps, we had an API for a while but it just wasn’t our flavour on drums. Too rock. The Sebatron you could get a bit drivey with it and keep it sounding cool.

[Editor’s note: Sebatron is a boutique gear manufacturer based in Melbourne. Google Sebatron and talk to Seb for more… full title: Sebastian.F.Sebatron CEO, chief designer, head of security, events organiser — Sebatron Audio.]

VALLEY AUDIO DYNA-MITE DYNAMICS PROCESSOR

PURCHASE PRICE: ~$1000 (USED)

Al: Sometimes we used a Valley Audio Dyna-mite (two-channel compressor/gate/compressor/expander). There are different versions; ours is an ’80s-era one. We used it across our drums quite a bit. The compression has a big VCA sound — in fact, it sounds a lot like a dbx — and then the gates are really awesome too. The way the gates open is super hard — you can hear the gate pop open — which can sound kinda cool. It’s almost like a hip hop sound, it makes acoustic drums sound like a drum machine which was a really cool effect at times. We did that on the title song Zone.

DBX 165A COMPRESSOR

PURCHASE PRICE: ~$1100 (USED)

Al: The next most important purchase after the Sebatron was a dbx 165A compressor. We knew nothing about it and had only ever used software compressors. But I’d heard it work in another studio on drums and I thought, ‘Okay I love that drum sound, and not just that drum sound, but I feel like the way that compression is working is really amazing’. It ended up being our go-to compressor on heaps of stuff.

Ulrich: I remember reading an article about Dave Fridmann’s production [Flaming lips, MGMT, Neil Finn and mixed Tame Impala’s Lonerism] and the gear he was using. Then you find out his go-to compressor is US$3000-plus. We had to confront the harsh reality of not having the freedom to buy our dream compressor. But the 165? We paid something like $1100 for it!

Al: Stuff just sounds sick through it. I don’t know what it is, but I haven’t heard any VST compressors that sound as good. Maybe that Kush Audio compressor [UBK1] would come close. But the 165, it just clamps so nicely. It’s good on so many things. Vocals as well — I was using it on my vocals.

We also bought a dbx 160 which is totally different.

Ulrich: The 165 is so gritty, but the 160 is super clean. The peak stop on the 160 is a little bit better than the 165, in my opinion. It’s a bit crispier, but then the 165 is a little bit gnarlier. They’re really different — the 160 doesn’t have as much character but it’s still sick.

Ulrich: You’re a big gate whore.

Al: You can flip the gate in Ableton so that it ducks. It’s like a super-accurate ducker. You can decide to duck something by precisely 4dB, and it hits it every time. I’ll often use that method instead of a compressor.

And if you do it on big pads with lots of treble you get that distinctive ‘Flume-y’ sound where you can hear it cutting. Not only that, you can develop something like a hierarchy of gates over the mix, with the vocals cutting the guitar level, for example, and then the drums gating most other things. It’s a handy technique for clearing space in your mix.

The Ableton gate is so good, right? It’s amazing how much you can get away with before it starts to sound weird. There’d be times where I’ve thought, “Oh you can’t be serious?!” But it still sounds cool.

If you don’t want the gate to just instantly clamp, then you have good control over the ramp time. But I think a clean cut is almost more effective because your brain gets taken in by the audio equivalent of a magician’s misdirection trick: the vocal comes in and the other thing’s gone quieter, but you can’t even remember how loud it was because it was instantaneously ducked.

The Izotope Alloy plug-in is another handy tool in this respect. It’s like an old version of Neutron that has a multi-track gate feature. Multi-track gating on a drum kit is really cool because you can get rid of all the low-level crap you really don’t want, and end up making the kick really, really tight and leave the parts you want to be a bit looser.

How many times have you been in the studio and thought, the drums are so cool, but what about all that rumble? Don’t worry about it, it’s gone.

Mmmm, gates…