> I'm not interested in less sonic quality than the era can give me.

Hey! Whipper-snapper... I'm an analog man living in a digital world! I'll take the sound that comes through some quality speakers off of an analog vinyl disc, over an over-produced, super-clean modern digital recording on any day of the week and twice on Sunday! Man, you can't even compare the sound quality of digital to vinyl. I don't want to digress or go off topic, but that remark about 'sonic quality' knocked me clean off of my bar stool! "Raw" is a big part of what made Motown music sound so good. When CBS took over Fender the first thing their genius engineers did was to eliminate all that 'nasty distortion' from the amplifiers - sales plummeted. They put the 'nasty distortion' back in the following year. :p

John

Always each to their own but I cant agree more about the "over-produced, super-clean modern digital recording" part. Theres just no soul to it.

Umm - you guys are obviously listening to the wrong music. There's a lot of excellent music being put out all the time, that is neither overproduced nor lacking in soul. The problem is that you have to look for it, because it's not commercial. If I took any of my beautiful drum kits into a studio and the engineer said "I want to put this great Tandy mic on your kit" I would reply "no, you're not - buy your own drum kit and do it - and play it too" The past is the past - it can't be recreated and it's not coming back. I deal with it and move on. Amy Winehouses great album is great because of the songs, the singing and the playing, not the retro drum sounds. Make your own sound. $00.02

Sorry mate but if you took the time to actually read what was written, at no time did anyone say that all modern music was over produced or lacked soul. I think theres plenty of great modern stuff out there so dont get your knickers in a knot because someone prefers something other than your preference and please dont tell me Im listening to the wrong music. All you have to base that on is that I said I enjoy the sound of motown drums. Well if enjoying that sound makes me "wrong" then hang me. As for your Amy Winehouse comment, I agree that the album is great because of the songs etc. but as a drummer I cant help but be attracted to music with a beautiful drum sound and to me her album has that.

The past is the past obviously but I think you'll find the amount of enthusiasts on this forum may just prove that it can still be enjoyed and recreated to an extent through our drums. I should stress however, that Im not trying to cause any kind of argument here. Context and intentions can be a hard thing to get across online so if I have misinterpreted you then thats why. I completely respect your opinion though.

Fair enough but I'm not interested in mono drums. It annoys me when engineers reach for this stuff. I love the sound of those old records as much as the next guy, just not into doing it again. If you want a Motown sound, tune high, use single ply heads, no muffling, use drums with thin shells and re-rings, bass drums with two heads and felt strips and that's more or less it. Every session drummer in the UK is buying this kit for that reason

http://www.mikedolbear.com/story.asp?StoryID=3479

Now that is extremely helpful stuff, Thanks :D . There seems to be many theories and contradictions regarding this sound in particular. Some people swear by muffling when others say none etc. Even the guys from the funk brothers contradict each other. Maybe some things are better left a mystery haha

Howdy, folks!

'Nother old dust****er weighin' in here:

In the same way that a cranked-up snare drum will affect the character of a backbeat differently than a Mutt Lange snare-of-doom, for example, with all else being equal...

IMO part of the appeal of the Motown records is the relationship between the sounds used and the songs played using them (along with the skills of the players, of course).

True enough, that was all happenstance because those sounds were just what those guys were getting on their nightly jazz gigs (not a lot of manipulation technology available to engineers back in them days). I've seen pics of Jamerson with his doghouse bass closer to the mic than the singers. Love that. Not to mention, Gordy being too cheap to replace the broken bottom head on the rack tom of one of the kits but they tracked with it anyway. Sure didn't seem to keep Motown from moving units at all.

That said, I'm a total anti-fan of the soup can, cranked-up-tight-as-a-gnat's-ass tom sounds that the jazz guys were getting back then. (I know part of that was the limits of the primitive "spoon in the slot" tom mounts on some of those kits ala' Gretsch and Slingerland.)

BUT....Have you heard any of the attempts to re-cut that stuff that they did back in the '70's and '80's, using what (at that time) were "modern" drum sounds? Remove the vocal tracks and they coulda been soundtracks to **** flicks. Yeccchhh....

Just like I personally hate Ringo's snare sound on the last couple of Beatles records. Like droppin' a sack of taters...BUT...picture a different snare on it and it just would be...for lack of a better term...wrong.

Just musings from a dottering curmudgeon. Thank ya fer yer indulgence.

ETA- A.M. radio. Mono. That stuff was mastered to sound good on A.M. radio. Totally different set of parameters.

OK, enough of what sounds like my defending of...whatever. Unintentional.

To address the OP, as stated previously: coated Ambassadors, "jazz"-size drums w/ felt strips on the BD, rack toms with the bottom head pitched pretty close to the top head (a third or less apart), snare drum tuned similarly and about mid-tight with loose-ish snare tension (typical be-bop at the time), sounds to me like 1 or 2 of them were digging the BD pedal's smackhammer into the head (Dig the intro of, "I Hear A Symphony". The pitch raises slightly at the end of each BD note. Dead giveaway.)

Lastly, and a biggie: THE ROOM. I'd read that when they moved Motown to L.A., they went back to Detroit at one point to retrieve the wood from the original room because they couldn't get that sound in L.A. You can't really have that sound without a similar room.

-One last ETA- Muffling. My take is wide open, except for the aforementioned felt strips on the BD and the internal muffler in the SD up tight against the head. The reason I say is because those guys weren't playing hard at all.

I say that because:

A.) Short of guitar, maybe a B3, and (later on) the bass, all of the instruments were acoustic. You mixed on the fly by positioning everything in order of its volume desired by its proximity to the mic. The louder you wanted it, the closer you put it to the mic. By nature, it's pretty easy for a drumkit to overdominate in a situation such as that, thus the guys' not really diggin' in.

B.) Those fellas were jazzers. They felt no need to crank up, anyway. No place for it in their world. (That said, it's fun to watch Bennie Benjamin slammin' on that Gretsch kit w/ the 24" BD in the Motown Revue footage.)

So if anyone should disagree, I get it. After all, I'm only speculating on SOME of this, based on 45 years experience.

Sorry for what's turned out to be a mini-book.

Goin' away now, I promise. :-)

I recall in NC years ago having this chat with an engineer, and he swore by wood shell 6 lug snare drums for the Motown sound. I used a Pioneer in my kit for our tribute to Motown show....give it a shot!

Tubwompus, I dig your post! Clapping Happy2

Mostly it's the drums, recording techniques, and tuning. To do it now, you'd need 50's or 60's drums, tuned higher as mentioned, and just a couple of mics. Lots of experimenting too.

You can make vintage drums sound like modern drums, but I've never been able to make modern drums sound like vintage drums. They're too precise.

Nowadays, I can't understand why we mic a drum set like a horn section. It's all one instrument, like a piano. You don't put mic's over each octave of a piano and mix it down. Having said that, there are different kinds of sounds for different styles of music, so we shouldn't force our Motown drums on a rock session. Having said THAT, Vinnie Colaiuta's been using the same set-up & sound on virtually every gig since the early 80's & it works for him. Of course, his playing makes most of us look like booger pickers.