Noam and Jessica are back in the studio for another episode of What's That Sound? and today, they're tackling a defining drum sound of the late '90s alternative genre: that of the Deftones' "My Own Summer (Shove It)," played by Abe Cunningham and produced by Terry Date.
The studio set today is a core vintage Gretsch kit with a (hard to find) Yamaha Jimmy Chamberlin signature snare. Cymbals-wise, we have a pair of 14-inch Zildjian K-Sweet hi-hats, a Zildjian splash cymbal, and an 18-inch K Dark Crash.
As Noam explains in the video, nailing this drum sound is really about the drums themselves—how they're chosen and then subsequently tuned and treated—rather than about how they're particularly recorded or processed.
A lot of what you'll see here on the recording and processing side are fairly standard practices and most of the mics used are common choices for capturing drums.
The bass drum was mic'd in a way you're all certainly familiar with by now: a Sennheiser 421 on the kick-in and a Bock Audio iFET on the kick-out. Uniquely, producer Terry Date used the same mic—Sennheiser 421s, in our case—on both the kick and the toms, sort of treating the toms as an extension of the kick.
The snare is another classic setup, with a Shure SM57 pointed at the top and bottom, both equidistant from the snare and place at exactly the same angle so that they would reinforce each other as much as possible. For the overheads, Date generally uses big tube mics so as to capture some of the sound of the rest of the drums. Today, we used Mic Shop MS47s to achieve this.
Be sure to check out the full video above to hear more about how all of the mics were placed and how the signals were processed to achieve this quintessential heavy drum sound that helped shape this genre.