Cold @ House Of Loud - Elmwood Park, NJ 8-10-10

It's studio tan time down here at the House Of Loud in New Jersey working with drummer Sam McCandless and his bandmates in Cold. We're just tracking a few songs and Sam likes to keep it simple drum set-wise: kick, snare, rack, and floor, hi-hats, crash and a ride, so my job is easy. Even easier if you consider that mixing legend Dan Korneff got great sounds (before we even noticed he was trying to get sounds) and producer Kato Khandwala is sprinkling his hit-making magic dust on the proceedings.
The vinatge Gretsch bass drum "tunnel" is a new twist on an old studio trick. Instead of the common ploy of using just a headless shell to get a longer chamber (and hence a deeper sound)for the air to move through, I keep the batter head on the Gretsch, allowing it to take the original attack of the DW and use the older shell as a second resonator. For some reason this works better than a double-headed kick drum or just a shell used as a tunnel.

Taylor Momsen and The Pretty Reckless @ The House Of Loud, Elmwood Pk., NJ

I'm back at The House Of Loud working with my friends Kato Khandwala, Ben Phillips, and Jamie Perkins again, this time on an new record by Taylor Momsen and The Pretty Reckless for Interscope. Taylor is a talented young actress best know for her role on Gossip Girl, but she's also a really good singer and songwriter who is collaborating with Ben and Kato on songs for her CD. Drummer Jamie Perkins was brought in to put live drum parts over the parts Kato composed and sequenced and I was brought in to make the drums sound good.

This is a Rock record with a capitol R and Kato sets the bar just as high for the drums as he does for the rest of the production, so the first order of business was getting a deep and full kick drum sound. I took the resonant head off of the house DW bass drum and used my 1960s Gretsch kick as a resonator in front of it. We put a D112 in the DW and a Rode Classic II in the Gretsch to get a punchy thick sound.

I got to use a brass Pearl Sensitone on a song called "Light Me Up" and I'm really happy with the way it turned out. I bought it used at GC a couple of years ago for short money, clean up the bubbling plating, and hot-rodded it for the studio. The drum sings like Pavarotti and has a musical cut to it not unlike an old Black Beauty.