For our latest episode of What's That Sound? Noam and Jessica are back at Rax Trax Recording in Chicago to tackle a song outside of the rock realm we've been in lately. Today, the dynamic duo is recreating Kacey Musgraves' country pop drums from her song "Golden Hour," originally performed by Ian Fitchuk and co-produced with Daniel Tashian.
Jessica's drum kit today was comprised of a Ludwig Vistalite bass drum, vintage '70s Gretsch rack toms, a Ludwig Supralite snare drum, and 14-inch Zildjian K-Dark Hats. The snare drum featured some Big Fat Snare Drum dampening tools, while the toms and hats were both covered with fabric.
While the drums on this track sound pretty natural, the trick is that lots of post-processing was used to get them there. For example, essentially the entire drum set was processed together on the master bus rather than processing each of the drum mics individually.
Noam kept the mic'ing for this track fairly standard—but added a few things to keep it interesting. In addition to the stereo pair of Coles 4038 room mics, Noam added a "wildcard" mic about six feet in front of the kit: a Neumann U 47 clone, the MS47, that was heavily compressed by an 1176.
The other mic, which Noam called the "knee mic," is a Sennheiser 421 placed above the kick and between the toms, facing the side of the snare. This mic was used to get some extra flavor from the kick drum and to trigger some spring reverb for extra space in the sound as a whole.
Elsewhere, the the kit had an AKG D12 on the kick-in and Soundelux ifet7 on the kick-out, a pair of Shure SM57s on the top and bottom of the snare, two AKG 414s on the toms, and a Mic Shop C-12 pair for the overheads.
Check out the full video above to see the complete rundown of how the drums were recorded and processed, and then click the listing above to download a free sample pack of the drums we created here.