I’m an ardent fan of Prog Rock - and we know what the drumming, both in recording and performance can be like. Cork sniffing at it’s finest. But the other day my daughter and I were listening to her mix tape (an actual cassette tape mix tape!) and she’d recorded a couple of Beatles tracks on it. I was taken aback by the sheer beauty of In My Life. There is literally no other drum part, set or recording that could make that song better. By todays standards it’s a royal mess of fuzzy and badly defined drum sounds. And yet its heaven to my ears!
As I listen to such a wide range of music normally, I’m as comfortable with an 808 creating the drum sounds, as I am Mike Mangini’s razor precise drumming in Dream Theater. The more I think of drums now, the less time I want to spend thinking about drums. But I’m also aware it’s an artistic endeavour we are involved in. As long as the sounds coming out of the speakers is true to what I hear in my head, I should have the right mic up my 40 piece drum set to the nth degree and spend days perfecting that sound. But I think I should have the right to grab my cafe drum kit and mic it up with 3 mics and pan the whole thing to the left ear and saturate the heck out of it.
