Fingers

Drum Together

This is what a Moog 960 sequencer sounds like triggering a Simmons SDS200. The Moog is also sending voltages to control what would normally be the velocity from a drum pad. Cool eh?



By the way - Robin - did this belong to you at some point???

Stylo-beat

Pete bought me a really cool little Stylophone beat-box for xmas (thanks Pete!), and here it is plugged into the very old Buchla 100. You can't really hear much of the Stylophone, its being mangled so much buy the Frequency Shifter and Band Pass Filter. Actually it was a test sound for the Seck mixer which distorts it all nicely I think

Gainsbourg Vibes, Yeah

Check out this amazing Powerhouse drum machine that Dave brought into the studio. It uses 8-Track tape cassettes with groovy recordings of real drums and percussion. Could anything be more 70s?

Drum Bloop

Testing the Buchla drum presets. You can find them on page 247 of the user manual...

Carl Palmer & Moog?

Someone over on Matrixsynth thinks perhaps Carl Palmer used some of the Moog drum modules featured in this post post on the Brain Salad Surgery album / tour, which is a very interesting development:

"via Suit & Tie Guy: "I believe this is one of the four machines built for the famous 1969 'Jazz In The Garden at MOMA' concert. after the show it was repackaged and sold to Eric Siday.

"it's possible and likely that these modules were also built for Carl Palmer's drum rig for the Brain Salad Surgery album. based on the panel controls it would seem reasonable to assume this. it would be great if someone close to Carl would find out if this is the case."

"Additional note via Suit & Tie Guy: "By 'these modules' I meant 'they pulled the films out and made a few for Carl as well' as opposed to the idea that Carl owned these pieces, which he did not."

"Update: turns out Carl Palmer's drum rig was not Moog but custom built.  If anyone has more info on it, feel free to comment or shoot me an email via the email icon on the bottom right. According to this post he did have a MOOG 1130 Drum Controller, but no sign of it in the following video:

Carl Palmer Showing Off His Drums-10-21-73-Aquarius"

The Moog Drum Machine!

Having said in this post that I didn't think Moog ever made a drum machine, I can happily announce that I was wrong. According to an anonymous reader Moog did make a one-off drum machine for composer Eric Siday, and what a beauty it is! It's currently housed at the intriguing Museum of Music in Paris, which has a website here. I managed to eventually find some pictures of the drum machine there, even though its all in french

The following is from Oliver Grall's web page on this subject:

"In 1970 Bob Moog built for Eric Siday an electronic drum synthesizer with the following modules:
- 701Drum Synthesizer
- 702 Percussion Synthesizer
- 903 Noise
- 912 Enveloppe Follower
- Programmer
- Wheels encoder
- Keyboard controller

The 701 and 702 modules are prototypes never and went in production.
It seems that there are some missing modules from the original configuration.
This unique system is owned now by the " Museum of music"
located in Paris France.

About Eric Siday
Eric siday was born in the suburb of London in 1905.
When he was 14 he received the Prosper Sainton scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music, London.
His first steady bread was playing for the "local cinema" silent movies.
He was composer and arranger and realized musics for commercials and jingles for radios ( ABC / CBS / Pepsi cola / American express )
In 1947 he composed a violin concerto in the "Bop" Jazz idiom.
He created his own recording studio (surely one of the first home studio).
In the middle 50's, he was aware of electronic music - John Cage (the prepared piano) and the French Music Concrete .
He was the fisrt to apply electronics sounds in commercials .
He used : Ondes Martenot / Ondioline / Violon amplified / Céleste / Moog Modular
and this unique Moog Percussion synthesizer.
He was the second customer of Bob Moog and bring a great support to the Moog company."

(B&W pictures: moog archives / synth fool)

Stone Me

When I moved in to this studio six years ago, there were a few bits and bobs I bought from the previous owner like the plate reverb and the big studio monitors and a bunch of stuff that looked like junk. So I had seen this little compressor knocking about usually buried under a pile of other broken things waiting to get fixed by Big Al. I often asked him about this particular unit because it looks well old and wonky and usually they are my favorite sounding things. But Al always said it was a piece of junk and anyway there were always more important things to fix so I forgot about it

A few days ago I was clearing through the huge junk pile that was in the small live room while I've been doing the refurb, and saw the compressor again and thought I would google the make and model just to see if it is worth fixing. So I put in "Audio and Design F600 limiter / compressor" which returned some very interesting results. Firstly it seems these compressors were not rubbish but in fact good enough to be put inside the legendary Helios consoles in the late 60s, early 70s. So far so good. Then I found an even more interesting article on a fab website about classic seventies recording studios. It describes the history of the Rolling Stones mobile studio, and in particular the recording of the legendary drum track on Led Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks. At this point i want to say that John Bonham is my favorite drummer of all time. Here is an excerpt from that article:

John Bonham had just received a new drum kit from the Ludwig factory. He was keen to try it out but the recording room was being used for guitars so a roadie set the kit up at the bottom of the Stairwell in the large entrance hall of the house

The height of the three story stairwell combined with the diffuse wood surfaces of the large hallway provided a fantastic natural reverberation. The sound of the Ludwig kit being hit by one of the most powerful drummers ever, enhanced by this wonderful acoustic, created magic

On hearing this, engineer Andy Johns realised that they had something special here. This was the place to record Bonham. Two Beyerdynamic M160 microphones were hung down the stairwell from the second floor, fed out into the mobile's Helios desk and heavily compressed with an Audio and Design F600 Compressor

OK, so now we are getting somewhere! I'm going to go back to Big Al and tell him that this wonky old compressor IS worth fixing, lets hear what it sounds like ASAP! So yesterday I told Al about all this and the fact that the A&D F600 was used on Bonham, and guess what he said? "But this actual unit came from the Stones mobile recording studio!" Kuma (the previous studio owner and the person I bought it from) got a job lot of stuff from the mobile recording truck back in the day - he played bass with Mick Taylor and knew the Stones crew and never bothered to fix the damn compressor either (Big Al was his tech too)

So there you have it - pretty anecdotal, I know, but damn - COULD THIS BE THE ACTUAL COMPRESSOR USED BY BONZO ON THAT DRUM TRACK!?!?!?! I know there is some debate over the specifics of the Led Zep recording process (eg, here), and it seems no one can much agree on anything ("...too stoned back then to remember" Big Al) but anyway, I'm saying that this IS that legendary unit, at least for a little while

Dury Drumming

I've been getting into Ian Dury again recently, what a geezer (and funky too). Check out this great vintage doc on youtube: part one

Diagramatic

Check out my friend Sam's new project Diagrams. Follow the link and download the track for free. The drums were recorded here at my studio a few months ago on my Gretsch kit. I really like this song, nice one Sam, can't wait for the album!!!

Sail to the Haunted Stars

I was browsing over at La Boca's blog and saw some nice stuff:

Tom Tom Club

Here are a few ebay auctions that caught my eye. First up is an astonishing mid-70s acrylic Sonor kit, all original and lovely. Asking price = 3600 euros

Next is a Gretsch maple kit from around 1980 from the same expert seller. Three drums, not even all matching [one has a square badge, the others hex] for £3500! I have the same kit but with 5 toms and bass and snare from this same vintage....

Sonor Mahem

Here is a gratuitous post about the Sonor drum kit I bought a while ago, which I have set up at home [it's too precious to have it at the studio where it will be hit repeatedly with wooden sticks by unruly visitors]

First up are some scans from a Sonor catalog that I used to have [in 1979 when I was 11]. I used to stare at every page endlessly re-reading every word and drawing pictures of the pictures and generally dreaming of owning one of these amazing instruments. Thanks to the great sonormuseum website where you will find the rest of this catalog and tons more Sonor stuff

Now what is interesting about these pictures [apart from the fact there is one of the Acryl kits exactly like the one here] is that the smallest kit featured was the one I longed for the most, namely the rosewood in picture 2, because that was my favorite finish

Well, two years ago my dream came true and I stumbled across the ultimate drum kit, bearing in mind what I've just said and also how obsessed I am with anything from the late 70s. Below is the post I put on the sonormuseum forum in August 2008 explaining what happened

Hi everyone
I have lucked-out massively this week. I wanted to fulfill a life long dream and get a vintage Sonor Phonic rosewood kit [ever since I got hold of a copy of the sonor catalog when I was 11 in 1979 - which I still drool over]

So I started looking on the bay, and put in a few enquiries on this board. I realised it wasn't going to be an easy task. Then I called a Sonor dealer here in the UK who put me in touch with a music shop in manchester who he thought had a Sonor kit knocking about. They sent me a picture of it and the next minute I was driving the 300 mile journey in a van trembling with excitement

The guy in the shop had told me it was in good condition. But in fact it was like walking into a drum shop in 1980 and buying a BRAND NEW SONOR DRUM KIT [except that it was cheaper, even in 1980 pounds]. It still had the red cardboard tags hanging on it and the original grease on the stands!!!!! The most it had been played was while it had been in the shop over the last few weeks. There is not a single scratch or mark on it anywhere. The chrome is perfect. It also had its original [Sonor?] cases. So I bought it and here it is set up in my front room. I would be interested to know its exact date. I guess the silver badges date it after 1980, and the hardware before 1983? The snare is a bit odd - its a 505 with a parallel snare - is that normal? Is there a way of dating them form the serial numbers on the badges? It sounds beautiful, amazing, like going back in time......

You can check out the thread here 

and also here

Below are lowres pics I took at the time, and below them is a video featuring the great Bernard Purdie, on his Sonorlite kit [a contemporary of the Sonorphonics that I have]

Ebay Day

Its Flu time again, so I'm watching a donkey-kong documentory on TV and browsing the bay a lot

Check this out, '70s Sonor Phonic Acryl in Germany for £1000 [he's selling a matching snare separately for £300]

Phaser Tests

I decided to make a comparison of the varoius Phaser units around the studio [and the 2 new ones I got in the post today - the Smallstone and Mu Tron. Thanks Omidyar!]

The test material is a Linn LM1 sequence going through the Studer 902 mixer with some Lexicon 224 on the snare, some Telefunken spring reverb on the bass drum, and the toms and hh are going through a Roland SBF-325 Flanger and Vesta digital delay. The whole lot is then going through a dbx 118 compressor. Its all in mono too becase the phasers are all mono



Okay, so here's a taste of the phasers. They were all set to full phase with slow modulation

1] Electro-Harmonix Smallstone phaser. This one is from the Cold War era. It's quite an interesting story probably and I haven't googled it yet but the result is a a black box that looks like a land mine

2] MXR Commande Series [1981]. A cheap plastic pedal that replaced the Phase 90 orange pedals of the 70s

3] Mu Tron Phasor II. This was released in the late 70s, and is exactly the same as one half of the Bi Phase phasor phaser
























4] Roland 100M 172 module. From the lovely 1978 modular series

5] Serge Modular. Made in the mid 70s in california and uses bananas

Ridiculous Snare Patch

I spent a few hours making a drum sequence for TW, [atoms] and here is the the anatomy of the snare sound:

Early Korgs

These would make a nice christmas present [both on ebay today]

Ghost Dance

I saw this film when it came out in 1983 and then forgot all about it. Then I bought a Sonor drum kit from a second-hand music shop in Manchester and suddenly I remembered this crazy scene from the film where Robbie Coltrane was playing exactly the same drum kit on the roof of a building while listening to the shipping forecast. So I spent ages trying to track the film down. I recommend it to anyone into hyper-pretentious 80s art movies. The best thing about it is actually the soundtrack by David Cunningham, Michael Giles and Jamie Muir, which is a beautiful mixture of studio processes and live performances. Check the main theme. I'm getting very exotic flavors with notes of chorus and phaser, and a hint of tape compression and tape delay. [I love this disclaimer from the record label website, which sums it all up for me really: 'the recording contains analogue tape distortion, noise and hiss which, besides being unavoidable, at times form an integral part of the music.']