By the way people (especially you drummers): A few years back I was cutting a track in Flora Recording & Playback, a fantastic studio in Portland, Oregon. T Bone has recorded there, as has Bill Frisell, Mavis Staples, REM, The Jayhawks, many others.
Anyway, I brought along my Ludwig Black Beauty snare drum and an assortment of cymbals (drummers often used their own snare drum and cymbals with the "house kit", both in recording situations and in live performances). Engineer/owner Tucker Martine had his house kit---a nice set of DW’s---set up well out into the middle of the medium-size room, a good sign (one small studio I was in in North Hollywood, CA had me set up right against a cinderblock wall. As I anticipated, the resulting recorded sound was God-awful. I moved my set into the middle of the room, and all was well. I hope the engineer learned from that lesson ;-).
Tucker let me know that he had spent a lot of time tuning and positioning the drums, and assured my client (a singer/songwriter/guitarist who engaged my services) and I that we would be happy with the drum sound he got. Looking around at the framed pics of some of his clients told me I should trust him ;-) and use his complete kit, including snare and cymbals.
My favorite ride cymbal sound is that heard in a lot of small-combo Jazz recordings made in the 1950’s: each cymbal tap made with the tip of the stick (rather than the shoulder) produces a very percussive, sharp "click" sound, not the broad "tang" cymbal sound heard in a lot of Rock recordings (listen to Ginger Baker’s cymbals. Terr-i-ble. I heard them live, and they sounded just as bad on stage. Now listen to Jim Gordon’s; beautiful!). That click sound is commonly attributed to the cymbals many Jazz drummers were playing in the 1950’s: the K. Zildjians made in Turkey. The problem with Turkish K Zildjians is that they were hand made, and the consistency was all over the map: a few sound REALLY good, a lot sound TERRIBLE! Finding a good one is really hard, and expensive.
So we do a take, and on playback the recorded sound of the ride cymbal had that percussive click sound I love so much. The cymbal sure didn’t sound that way in the room, and in the recorded sound I thought I could hear the how and why Tucker was able to produce that cymbal sound. I asked him: "Did you use compression and/or a noise gate on the overhead mics?" (which capture the sound of the cymbals). He was impressed, replying "Yes", confirming my suspicion. Explaining how a compressor and noise gate work would take too much space to do here.
You see, audiophiles, in Pop music---or even most studio-made recordings---the sound you hear through your hi-fi system is often not "the absolute sound", but rather an artificially-created one, made to simulate live music. Sometimes the recorded sound is actually better than what the music sounded like in the room in which it was recorded. It’s like that great scene in David Lynches Mulholland Dr., when the master-of-ceremonies waves his hands on stage, pronouncing that what the two women had just seen (and thought they heard) was "an illusion". Harry Pearson should have spent more time in recording studios ;-) .
