I hold no pretense of being a Led Zeppelin expert, however John Bonham’s drum sound is one that practically everybody wants to emulate.  Whether you actually want to play like him is another story, but it would seem like every drummer would love to be as bombastic and aggressive as Bonham.

The truth of the matter is that if you want to sound like John Bonham, you really need to play like him. You probably shouldn’t be ripping off 32^nd note paradiddles at 140 BPM on your Iron Cobra. Moreover, your playing style, the orchestration of your tune, and your own nuances will directly inform the possibilities for your sound. This isn’t to say that you need to be on the same level as Bonham to sound like him, but there are songwriting elements that anyone can use to help accomplish a desired sound.

Listen to any Zeppelin record and you’ll notice that he is very, very simple with his beats in the vast majority of his tunes. Sometimes he only hits the kick drum twice in a measure. This leaves a ton of room for him to have that gigantic bass drum sound that we all know and love.

In most of his kits, John Bonham had a kick drum well over the standard 22” in most commercial kits these days. His bass drum was truly a bass drum often measuring 26 inches. His kick sound is very open lots with of ring and resonation without much dampening. This was pretty normal in a lot of records in the 60s to mid 70s.  In all likelihood it would’ve been similar in much earlier recordings if the technology existed to reproduce those low frequencies.

In the 70s, dance music reduced the kick drum to a very tight, short tick as opposed to the bass foundation for the tune. This kept mixing kick drums simple, the dance beats driving and easily distinguishable, and allowed tunes to be more lushly orchestrated (especially in the bass range which was great for diversity in the dancehall).  However, it put the idea of a big bassy bass drum on the back burner in favor of a more punchy kick sound.

Now to sound like Bonham, you don’t need a 26” monster of a kick drum. What I do is take out all of the dampening in the bass drum:  pillows, towels, everything. Put single ply heads on the kit so that they resonate more (single ply heads have longer sustain, multiple plys are used to make things more durable). Then, detune the kit as low as possible without it sounding like hitting loose paper (more on this in a later article on tuning drums for the studio). The aim is to achieve a deep, long, low sustain. Once you’ve achieved the maximal effect like this, you can tailor the decay by applying dishtowels or something light to the front heads to dampen slightly.

Look at the picture above.  You’ll notice two microphones on Bonham’s kit in the studio.  One is a U87 and the other looks like  a Unidyne 57.  You’ll also notice that he has no hole in the front head and doesn’t have a D112 shoved up in at and against the beater head.  This provides a barrier that reduces the tick of the beater and increases the boom of the resonations from the head and drum bodies.

If you are ripping off 32^nd note paradiddles at 140 BPM, there is simply no room for you to sound like John Bonham with this kick drum sound—it’ll end up being a gigantic bass wash. All that steady low-end will severely restrict the amount of loudness you can get out of your song since low frequencies take up such a huge portion of the power spectrum. Because of this, either your kick drum is loud and your tune is quiet, or your tune is louder and your kick drum is quiet. Let that kick drum resonate, give it space to be appreciated and you’ll start moving closer to that Bonham sound.

It is also crucial to understand that in a mix, no sound is an island. In order for something to be big, something else has to be small. So when you listen to a Zeppelin recording, you’ll notice that there is an awful lot of space in the other instruments that frame the drums very nicely. Jimmy Page doesn’t just machine-gun power chords through the Big Muff which would result in a gigantic square wave. He has a lot of single line melodic elements that are often in the higher register that juxtapose Bonham’s big boisterous drum sound (see “All of My Love”).

Try approaching your tunes with some prior planning—if you think you’d like a John Bonham type of drum sound, then orchestrate the part like it would be a Bonham tune. You’ll find that from the onset, your drummer will sound more like Bonham and your engineer should have an easy time getting the sound you want out of whatever mic set-up you have—no matter where you recorded it, no matter what gear you used.

Oh yah, and smack the shit out of the drums…Bonham would be proud.

You’ve probably heard someone say, “don’t buy [insert hard drive brand]… mine crashed on me and I lost everything.” You may have heard that LaCie drives do not fail.

But you’re still not sure, so you do a little research.

You check out some reviews online, do a search on Gearslutz.com… maybe you’ll go to Guitar Center and have Joe Shred* tell you what he likes to use, next thing you know you’re leaving confused, half-naked with a bunch of $3,000 Monster cables…

Or you ask me and I’ll tell you to pick whatever has cool-looking lights on the front. And I’ll insist that you buy three of them.

But we’ll get back to that in a minute. As far as deliverables** go, LaCie is the industry standard. Like Apple and Pro Tools, many people won’t take you seriously if you’re using anything but LaCie. While I was working for Avatar in NYC, we used exclusively LaCie drives for data storage and deliverables (unless requested otherwise).

So I used to believe they didn’t crash too. That is, until my D2 Quadra crashed after 3 weeks for no apparent reason. At that point I decided to do some research of my own:

That’s right, the hard disk itself isn’t made by LaCie at all. Turns out, this is true for most external hard drive manufacturers.

You can get flashy. Avastor and Glyph drives use more expensive components and are often considered the best by those in the know. Personally, I put spinners on my Glyph 050Q:

But even Glyph uses Seagate disks*** (they have found Seagate to be the most reliable). In other words:

No matter how much money you spend, your drive will fail. You will lose data. And you will be pissed.

So what does all of this mean? Buy anything and pray?

Yes! …well no, but when you’re picking out an external hard drive you can pretty much remove reliability from the equation (barring any widely-reported glitches). I went with Glyph for three reasons:

1. Excellent warranty and replacement policy
2. High-quality components, including the bridging chip (bridging is supposedly the second most common source of external hard drive failures , although I could find no official study to confirm this)
3. Good tech support

The moral of the story is this: the only real way to be safe is to have at least three copies of everything, one of which should be in another location to account for physical damage or theft. I back up sessions to several hard drives as well as data DVDs, which I mail out of state bi-weekly. That means even if Fix Your Mix HQ gets nuked, your session is in Atlanta somewhere…

To be fair:

• LaCie customer service was very good to me and tech support was moderately prompt. I would not hesitate to use a LaCie in the future. I’m just saying that I also wouldn’t hesitate to use anything else.
• My Glyph 050Q fan was clicking and whirring within a week, but tech support told me a temporary fix (stick a paper clip in between the fan blades during boot up) and sent me a replacement fan, free of charge.

Have your own hard drive horror story? Share it in the comments section.

*Okay, okay. Not all Guitar Center sales reps are evil, soul-sucking capitalist pigs. But you know who you are.

**A deliverable is exactly what it sounds like: an item, product or artifact which must be created and then delivered as part of an obligation. In the audio industry that may mean hard drives, data DVDs, CD masters, session recall notes, et al.

***(Source)

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Now listening to:

“Living Without” by Slim Thug Presents Boss Hogg Outlawz

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Artist: Justice
Album: †
Released: 2007
Genre: Electro/Dance
For Fans Of: Daft Punk, MGMT, Ratatat
Stand-Out Tracks: “DVNO,” “D.A.N.C.E.”

 

 
After much deliberation, I’ve decided to kick off our Monday music reviews with something you can dance to: French duo Justice. Their album † is a mix between electro, hipster disco and good ole’ fashion pop with samples (probably intended to be ironic) from Three 6 Mafia to Devo to the Brothers Johnson.

 
Sonically, the brightness of † shocked me upon first listen. It was mastered to be as sparkly as the brightest techno record out there, yet they’re more associated with the hipster/electro scene than anything going on in Europe. It sounds like a harmonic exciter set to STUN in the range of 12 kHz and above.

 
The arrangements are amazing throughout the whole album. They come together in a way that I full band really can’t, because the depth of instrumentation and tonality is limitless with electronic music, especially sampled music. Chopped-up sounds cut in and out at will, creating a dense harmonic landscape which is too fast-paced to comprehend until you’ve listened over and over again. It is a mix of the familiar (e.g. slap bass, disco-style drums, catchy vocals) and the foreign (e.g. distorted found sounds, granular synthesis).

 
I contend that that their crossover success (from Eurodance to the American indie scene) is owed to two things:

 
1) Vintage samples. Had they used modern keyboard drum kits and synth patches, Justice would not have made an impact on American pop music, nor would they have been nominated for a Grammy.

Instead, they took a cue from American hip hop (the “digging in the crates“ aesthetic) by using lofi drum hits, funky basslines and retro synth sounds.

 
2) The role of the snare drum. The snare plays a much more significant role here than in a typical techno album. It is up front in the mix and has a considerable amount of low end.

 
Justice also has an impressive remix resume, including N*E*R*D, Justin Timberlake, Franz Ferdinand, U2 and a 2009 Grammy-winning remix of MGMT’s “Electric Feel.” No plans for any new Justice releases yet, but I will post when they are announced.

 
Buy the album † from the music group that outranks the US Department of Justice on Google.

We’re very excited about the relaunch of the Fix Your Mix blog, now covering a range of topics including songwriting and production, industry trends, client news and much, much more. Check out the right sidebar for our content schedule.

We want to get friends, clients and audio nerds alike involved, so comment whenever you have something to say!

Keith