For this week's episode of What's That Sound?, Noam and Jessica are in the studio to recreate a late 1990s hip-hop hit, The Roots' "You Got Me." The drummer on this track was Questlove and the track and was produced by The Roots. And what's most interesting about these drums is that they sound sampled but are actually acoustic.
The kit this week was an interesting composition. It features a 16-inch Ludwig floor tom that's stuffed with acoustic foam being used as the kick drum with a felt beater, a Yamaha Dave Garibaldi signature snare, and 14-inch Zildjian K-Dark Hats.
To recreate these drums, Noam had to deconstruct what made the live drums sound like samples in the recording. Part of this, he says, has to do with the separation between the instruments. Mic placement, therefore, is particularly important, and he had to make sure they were placed in a such a way to prevent as much bleed as possible from the instruments the mic doesn't directly target.
Another super important part of recreating this isolated, sample-style sound is being able to control the lengths of each drum. The team had to find various clever ways of doing this with each drum. For the snare, for example, this meant tuning the drums just right and adding exactly the right amount of dampening to really nail the right length. The same was done to the kick, but that being a trickier drum to control, some of the dialing in there had to be done through processing.
Check out the full video above to see the complete rundown of how Noam approached recording and processing these recreated Questlove/The Roots drums. Then click the listing above to download a free sample pack of the drum sounds that we created here.