This thing keeps happening every single time I listen to one of my favorite songs of the
last 5 or so years.
I hear this weird but familiar drum sound that just cuts right through the track.
I love it.
Here it is one more time.
That punchy, unnatural drum was the sound of the 80s and it’s back.
It's called gated reverb, and like many of the greatest inventions, it was discovered
by accident.
In the 1970s, drums on the radio sounded a lot like this
Host: They're quite dry aren't they?
They're just as recorded.
To achieve that isolated clean sound, producers and engineers mic’d the drums all over,
including the inside.
This was the sound of bands like Pink Floyd, Earth Wind and Fire, and Genesis.
At least up until 1979.
That’s when Peter Gabriel was recording his third solo album.
His Genesis bandmate, Phil Collins, was on the drums playing a simple beat.
And here's where something magical happened.
So, according to their engineer Hugh Padgham, their engineer, they had a brand new recording
console with some cool features that included a mic hanging in the studio to talk to the
band.
That mic accidentally picked up Phil’s drum and the result was a thick punchy reverb that
disappeared in an instant.
The reason?
The mic had a heavy compressor on it.
Which reduces the volume of loud sounds and amplifies quiet ones - it sort of crunches
a waveform.
And the console had a noise gate which only lets amplitudes above a certain threshold
pass through and then it immediately shuts off.
The result was such a crazy sound that Peter Gabriel wrote his album opener, “Intruder”,
around it.
Now, if you don’t know “Intruder” you’ll certainly recognize this - made by Phil Collins
and Hugh Padgham a year later.
"I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh
Lord And I've been waiting for this moment for
all my life, oh Lord"
Thanks
to a happy accident, the sound of
the 80s was born.
"I've been waiting for this moment for
all my life, oh Lord"
The drums on “In the Air Tonight” were recorded in Townhouse’s legendary Stone
Room - its reverb came from the walls of the studio.
It was meant to sound like a castle.
But not everyone who wanted good reverb had access to that type of space.
In the '80s, once the digital technology came to the fore not only was the sound of our
music changing, but the things that augment our sounds were changing also.
Nothing illustrates this more than the evolution of reverb.
Reverb was achieved in the early days the most natural way of all, which is to have
an echo chamber.
You would set up in one corner of the room a big loudspeaker and in the other corner
of the room, you'd set up a microphone.
Here’s an echo chamber at Abbey Road Studios.
Echo chambers took up real estate and real estate was expensive so plate reverb was invented.
There'd be a big box with an aluminum plate in it,
and the voice would go in one side, travel along the aluminum plate, and come out the
other side with a little bit of reverberation on it.
Plate reverb boxes were 600 pounds or more.
Not great for portability.
Enter the AMS RMX16, a shoebox sized unit that created reverb via circuit boards and
algorithms.
Right there, in a box, we had plate reverbs and underground garages and big concert halls
and small and large echo chambers, and music clubs.
The AMS which debuted in 1982 was the first reverb unit to be driven by a microprocessor
and it had room for 99 presets including a few that that created that unnatural gated
sound with a push of a button.
I think a big example was the work that I did with Prince in the 80s.
He loved that gated reverb.
Uh, yes, that Prince.
Prince used an Linn-LM1 drum machine that sampled real drum sounds.
Susan fed that Linn-LM1 to the AMS reverb box and used a preset called “nonlinear.”
Nonlinear reverb just can’t be replicated in the real world without technology.
Reverb in a natural setting tends to fade as the audio signal decays.
Nonlinear reverb actually gets louder.
It makes a drum sound like a whip.
Picture it like a tidal wave, a huge wave suddenly stopping and hitting a brick wall.
That's the sound of gated reverb.
That was the classic, quintessential example.
That was the big one, that was the fat one.
"You don't have to be beautiful to turn me on"
A year after “In the Air Tonight,” those huge drums were no longer an accident, the
sound was built into reverb technology.
Then for a decade, gated reverb was a sound you just couldn’t escape on the radio.
"It's in the trees!
It's coming!
When I was a child running in the night"
- drum fill -
"Oh, let it rock, let it roll"
We really kind of used it to death, and by the next album, by Sign of the Times, I was
pretty sick of it.
It seemed everybody else was too.
When the 90s rolled around musicians favored those dry drums again.
But here’s the thing.
After a about 20 year hiatus, It’s back.
"Hey!
When I needed!"
Here’s Ariel Rechtshaid on Song Exploder he produced Carly Rae Jepsen’s latest album.
That drum fill is something that I always just had in my head.
They were inspired by Jack & Diane by John Cougar Mellencamp.
- Drum fill -
"I'm in love and you've got me, runaway"
Jack Antonoff of Bleachers was born the year Prince released Purple Rain and here he is
in his studio playing that Linn-LM1 drum machine.
He produced Lorde’s latest album which has gated drums.
"In your car the radio up.
In your car the radio up"
And Taylor Swift’s aptly titled 1989.
"It's 2am in your car"
The thing is, producers today don’t need Prince’s
drum machine or a physical rack of reverb units to get that 80s sound.
You can go online and download massive Prince and Phil Collins inspired gated reverb drum
sample packs.
And that AMS RMX 16?
It’s now a computer plug in.
Sure, gated reverb drums aren't a timeless sound.
They bring you back to the 80s, but that doesn't mean they don't sound cool.
This episode of Earworm is brought to you by audible.com
If you go to audible.com there are so many amazing books about music.
But there's one that I defintely want to recommend and that's Listen to This by Alex Ross.
Alex Ross is a long time music critic at the New Yorker and he's written some of my favorite
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If you want to understand music more or appreciate it better, Listen to This definitely has you
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And if you choose not to keep the service, you can still keep the book.
On other thing is I made a spotify playlist for you.
The link is in the description.
It's called An Ode to Gated Reverb and it has some of my favorite songs with gated reverb
from the 1980s and today.