by Cicero in nove ottavi » 13 May 2007, 19:08
A quel che ne so, il suono della batteria di Phil Collins e` in realta` una creazione di Hugh Pagdham, technico del suono dei Genesis e piu` tardi di Phil e Peter Gabriel e tanti altri.
Questo e` un estratto da un'intervista a Hugh, dove e` spiegata la storia (in inglese)
Padgham had met Collins while engineering Peter Gabriel [3], which Steve Lillywhite produced. And it was working in Townhouse Studios' Studio 2, recording Gabriel's “Intruder,” that Padgham first stumbled on a new drum sound that was based around the capabilities of the studio's brand-new SSL console — one of the first made — which had compressors and noise gates on every channel. “Up until then, that had not been seen before and was deemed to be either unnecessary or an extravagance,” Padgham recalls. “But this was the first console where you didn't have to say to the assistant, ‘Can you plug in a compressor please or a noise gate?’ You pressed a button and there it was. It allowed us to be more immediate.
“It was also one of the first consoles to have reverse talkback,” Padgham continues. “On a normal console, you have a button to press to talk to the musicians in the headphones, but you did not have a button to press for us to listen to the musicians. To do that, you'd plug a microphone into a spare channel on the desk and listen to your musicians through that. But the SSL had a reverse talkback button and there was a microphone hanging up in the studio already, a dedicated input into the reverse mic input on the console. And on this microphone, they had the most unbelievably heavy compressor, so you could hear somebody who was over in the corner.
“One day, Phil was playing the drums and I had the reverse talkback on because he was speaking, and then he started playing the drums. The most unbelievable sound came out because of the heavy compressor. I said, ‘My God, this is the most amazing sound! Steve, listen to this.’ But the way the reverse talkback was setup, you couldn't record it. So I had the desk modified that night. I got one of the maintenance guys to take the desk apart and get a split output of this compressor and feed it into a patch point on the jack field so I could then patch it into a channel on the board. From there, we were able to route that to the tape recorder.”