We start tracking drums today for the new Riverdales album - Invasion U.S.A. Recording a 14 song album on a shoestring budget can be challenging but we've managed to pull some strings here and proceed with duct tape and bubble gum there and the end result is that our studio time is pretty cheap, enabling us to spend 9 days tracking and another 7 mixing (it helps that the album will be mixed in our producer's home rather than in a studio).
When we were recording the second Riverdales album, Storm The Streets, in 1997, we worked at the Uberstudio in Chicago. It was a nice studio with a huge main room that was great for a big drum sound (listen to Bark Like A Dog by Screeching Weasel for an example - that drum sound is not the result of a lot of effects added in the mix. It's the room). Well, for Storm The Streets we were going for a dead drum sound, similar to what you can hear on The Ramones' Rocket To Russia.
The big room was out of the question so we set the drums up in a small walkway between the main room and the back room, the latter of which housed the bathroom, a couch and a TV. The walkway had sliding glass doors on either side but even with the doors closed it was too live for what I wanted. We hauled a bunch of large pieces of foam out of the back room and taped it to the walls. Still too live. We slapped more foam on the ceiling, and the floor. Better, but the snare wasn't dead enough. Finally, we threw a t-shirt over the snare, then another. The end result was a snare sound unlike anything I'd ever heard before or have heard since. It's not uncommon for drummers to put towels over drum heads when recording so it's not like we invented the idea, but it resulted in a really unusual, distinctive sound. I loved it, our drummer hated it, and a day into tracking the studio owner walked in, looked at us like we were imbeciles for having wasted a day and a half getting drum sounds and informed us that the Rocket To Russia snare sound was a simple matter of using a snare with a damper pad in it and tightening the pad much higher than you normally would. Which is exactly what I did on most of my subsequent recordings. It usually took me about 4-5 minutes to get the sound. (When I worked on the Queers "Today" EP [reissued as part of this album] I made do with a triangle of duct tape on the snare head which worked fine as long as the drummer hit the snare in the middle of the triangle).
On this recording we're not using one of those snares. Justin Perkins, the producer, is instead attaching a small army of moon gels (essentially a removable, reusable damper pad) to the snare head in order to get the sound we want. I expect to hear the first couple of tracks mid-afternoon so we'll see how it works.