Recording - December 2017 - 12

DARRELL

THORP

goes for the (concrete and) gold

inside the recording of the
latest foo fighters album

so much time with each track as we went. The actual mix was just
a little bit of gain riding, for solos, vocal licks, and that sort of thing.

a little brightness, if something's too muddy or harsh... When
I'm doing the recording, I go for it, just as much as I can.

Let's start with the drums. Did Dave play any drums on
the album, or was it all Taylor [Hawkins]?

Do you remember any specific details you can share
about the guitars?

It was all Taylor, minus one song, which was Paul McCartney.

I heard the record and recognized his playing immediately
from his solo albums, he has a distinctive 1960s loping
laidback style. What can you tell us about the drum setup?

We had two live kits set up, one more modern and one more
Zeppelin-y with a 26" or 28" double-headed bass drum, and we also
had a kind of a kooky dead drum kit in an iso. We had three kits
set up at once, which was rad, and all we did was change out snares.
We had a Neumann U47fet and a Yamaha Subkick on
the kick, Shure SM57s top and bottom on the snare. The hihat was usually a Lauten Series Black LA-120, and I'd use a
Neumann KM84 because we only had so many Lautens lying
around. Toms were either the Sennheiser MD421 or the Lauten
LA-220. Overheads were C12s on one kit, and the other kit, I
think, had Shure SM91s. I'm big on mono overheads, which
was either a Coles 4038 or an AEA 44. The room mics were
Neumann M50s, of which EastWest has two pairs.

Studio 1 must sound incredible for drums!

Studio 1 is amazing, because it's this ginormous space, but it's
so contained... it's just insane. There are too many guitars on the
album to take advantage of the room sound that I was getting
[laughs]. Except for one track, "The Line," where all the guitars
drop out and leave the drums, bass, and vocals, and then you
can really hear the room sound for a minute. Oh, and Taylor has
this one big tom fill on "The Sky Is A Neighborhood".... [laughs]

I run into that all the time-you get this great drum
sound, and then the rest of the band comes in and lays
down all these guitars and fills up the space and ask
where the drum sound went! With three guitarists,
how did you deal with finding space for them all?

The cool thing about the Foo Fighters is that while they have
three guitarists in the band, first of all, all the guitar rigs are
very different, which gives a very different sonic landscape
throughout the spectrum, and second, they're very different
players. So on a case by case basis, I'd decide on who I
panned where, all depending on how the song was being
built up. Sometimes when they'd do little melodic riffs that
worked together, I'd pan them so they'd speak to one another.

Are you the sort of engineer that likes to get your sounds
going in, or do you prefer to create them later with plug-ins?
From the way you said you tracked, I'd assume the former.

I'm getting my sounds on the way in. I tend to only use plugins for auxiliary cleanup; if something's too dark, I can add
12

RECORDING December 2017

Each guitarist had two main amps that they'd tend to go to
for the basic tracks. Then, for overdubs, it was a motchpotch-
we'd use whatever fit best in the mix for that song. I'd say we
had about 20 different guitar amps set up all the time.
My usual go-to setup is a Royer ribbon and a 57, but at the
time I only had a couple of Royers at my disposal, so I was mixing
it up. A couple of amps used a Lauten Atlantis and a 57; others
had a 421 and a 57, or a Neumann U87 and a 57. I had
good success with the Lauten LA-320 and a 57. The goal was
to have every amp miked up, so if we were going with the VOX
AC30, I'd just have to patch it across into Dave's chain.
On the console, each guitarist would have two signal chains,
slightly different-two for Dave, two for Pat, two for Chris. Depending
on what we were doing, I'd just say, "Take those two mics and
patch them to Dave's main chain," and we'd be ready to record.
I love having two mics on an amp-one for the thickness,
and the other, the 57, for the bite. I was finding that the balance
of the two was off, and things were starting to get muddy...
but the wonderful thing about a studio like EastWest is that
they have a whole rack full of Lang EQs, and those are the
schizznits on electric guitars! [laughs] So I'd give a little boost
with the high-Q around the 4k area and add a little bite.
I'm not big on highpass filtering all my guitar tracks. I feel
that even if the wisdom is that "nothing's down there", every
bit you take out can cost you something later, especially when
you're stacking parts. Nothing below 60 Hz, fine... but if your
highpass is at 80, eventually you lose some of that thickness.
Now, if something's rumbling, yes, I'll highpass it... and I highpass vocals, too... but pretty much everything else, I never do it.

With all those mics set up, did you run across any combinations that made you decide to file them away in your
head? "I'm definitely going to use that one in the future"?

Because I'm friends with Brian [Loudenslager] at Lauten Audio
as well as an artist, I tried sticking an Atlantis on a couple of loud
amps... I'm talking lah-ood. I said, "Let's really beat them up and
see what happens!" [laughs] The Atlantis, just by itself, gives you
a really freaking cool guitar amp sound. Really thick and big!
I didn't expect it to be that large. And it handled the SPL really
well, it never crapped out... it was amazing! It has that voicing
switch on it, but I just left it on Neutral. It didn't need anything.

Was the bass direct, or did you mic an amp?

Both. We had a Demeter DI with a dbx 165 compressor just
to control it just a little bit, and an amp. We had an Ampeg B-15
setup, and an Ampeg SVT head setup, with a U87 on both. The
amp chain had an 1176 on it, to compress it pretty hard.

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