How do you get this famous sound?

J

Joshoto

New member
Alright maybe some of you have heard of the flaming lips? Well they have a very unique sound when it comes to their sampled drums. It's that real real heavy slightly distorted bass hits, bass kicks that go BOOM with that lo fi dirt. All their hits sound like a damn explosion and god i'd love to find out how do that. I guess only some flaming lips fans will get my vague idea. I'm not asking answers on HOW to do that because i know it takes a lot of experimenting and time...i was just wondering if anyone else was interested in this kind of style
 
Always been a Flaming Lips fan.

Good stuff.

Lots of ways you can get that type of sound. Some of the old MXR Dual limiters you can find on ebay do that general sort of thing. Even a few plugins; Quadrafuzz, PSP Mixsaturator, Vintage Warmer, etc.

Flaming Lips were also fond of the ART Pro VLA, from what I understand. If you were to drive one of those pretty heavily and use some extreme settings, you could get some serious pumping and breathing on the drums. You could even get an old reel-to-reel deck and overdrive that well in to the red and see what happens.

Again, lots of different ways to get there. It's basically just extreme compression / limiting and distortion (most likely produced by the extreme comp/limiting). And a lot of things will distort if you drive them.
 
alot of those drums that are recorded are squashed with an older urei (universal audio) 1176. its got 4 little buttons for the ratio settings and you can push em all in at once to get this fat distorted compression. think the new ones have a setting for this and some distressors have a "british mod" that enables em to emulate this sound. ive never been able to get this sound through other comps than that. its a great effect and freidman uses the hell out of it on transmissions, clouds and zaireeka for sure. the drum hits in the intro for turn it on are huge.
 
Hey, also a Lips fan. One interesting observation I had with their bass drum sound, besides that it is compressed like crazy, is that they sometimes use a sampler to vary the tonal properties. Take a good listen to "Waitin' for a superman" on some good speakers. The bass drum frequencies are manipulated to sound like a low keyboard or sub-drum. Just thought I would add that to your experimentation list.
 
Sound & Vision said:
Take a good listen to "Waitin' for a superman" on some good speakers. The bass drum frequencies are manipulated to sound like a low keyboard or sub-drum.
Click to expand...

Just had a listen. What makes you think that's not a bass on top of the kick drum?
 
huge lips fan... anyways, a ton of their drum sound comes from the fact that they usually only use one mic for the entire kit - hard to imagine on songs like "the gash". There is no mic in the bass drum. obviously, its very compressed also.
 
aaronlyon said:
Just had a listen. What makes you think that's not a bass on top of the kick drum?
Click to expand...

I believe it isn't because it decays within the bass drum "envelope". The overtones of the bass drum are actually changing. Watch the frequencies in a spectrum analyzer. I may be entirely wrong, and that is the beauty of production tricks I guess; to make the impossible sound believable.
 
also a lips fan. i think they experimented like crazy with their recordings as they did with everything else. i love the roomy big drums sound.
 
Sound & Vision said:
Hey, also a Lips fan. One interesting observation I had with their bass drum sound, besides that it is compressed like crazy, is that they sometimes use a sampler to vary the tonal properties. Take a good listen to "Waitin' for a superman" on some good speakers. The bass drum frequencies are manipulated to sound like a low keyboard or sub-drum. Just thought I would add that to your experimentation list.
Click to expand...

Waitin' for a superman......the regular one or the remix? on the regular, i just hear a big bass drum. i just hear bass drum and bass in the remix. i'll take another listen.
 
lips fan here too... just ran across this thread thot I would post... Steven also get his big sound from the types and sizes of drums he uses (24 or 26 in. kick drum big toms and the old chrome ludwig concert snare) when they recorded "Transmissions from the satallite heart" He recorded a the drums in a cinderblock drum room at studio 7 in OKC Ok. and I believe he used the same tecnique when they recorded the next album after... but they do experiment alot w/ sound also... I've often wondered how the get the vocal distortion also (but that's been pretty much answered) I think also they used 4-6 mics on the drums during these rocordings... not sure tho I'll ask next time I talk to him
 
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