The studio accident that birthed ‘the 1980s drum sound’
When you think of the most iconic drum fills in history, it’s likely that after an initial scramble to think of the best efforts from the John Bonhams and Keith Moons of the world, you’ll probably come to realise that there are few that are quite as iconic and instantly recognisable as Phil Collins’ ‘In the Air Tonight’. Even reading the name of the song is enough to set off a short rendition of the track in your brain, complete with all of the production features that make it what it is.
For those of you who aren’t savvy on music production lingo, the technique used to get this drum sound is known as gated reverb, which is used to create the punchiness felt in each hit of the drums by cutting off the tail of the reverb. This is a technique that was hugely popular in the 1980s, and ‘In the Air Tonight’ was one of the first examples of a hit song to have used this particular production feature. Still, the story of how it came to be so widely used in pop music is a little more unusual and stems from a different recording session involving Phil Collins.
In 1979, while working alongside his then-Genesis bandmate Peter Gabriel on his third studio album, recording engineer Hugh Padgham noticed that the microphone suspended from the ceiling of the live room to communicate with the band had accidentally been picking up the sound of Collins’ drums. Due to the microphone’s heavy compression, it was filtering out parts of the recording through its application of a noise gate.
The unusual sound that they had captured fascinated Gabriel, and he decided to try and recreate the sound with Collins once more, with the drum beat that opens his 1980 album Peter Gabriel (also known as Melt) on the track ‘Intruder’ making use of this newly discovered gated reverb sound. While this isn’t exactly one of the best-known uses of it, Collins’ love for the sound led him to use it on later releases, and with the drum fill that comes almost four minutes into ‘In the Air Tonight’, the gated reverb drum sound was propelled into the spotlight.
Drums in pop and rock music prior to this had always had the same dry sound that they would have had in the studio, but it was this moment of accidental innovation that drastically changed that, with several artists choosing to adopt the same recording and production technique to emulate the drum sound that Gabriel and Collins had achieved first on ‘Intruder’. Throughout the rest of the ‘80s, it felt almost impossible to hear a song on the radio that wasn’t using gated reverb on the drums, with artists such as Daryl Hall & John Oates and Prince getting a lot of mileage out of the sound.
This then led future technologies to automatically include the gated sound as a recording preset, allowing artists to easily reproduce the same effect on their own recordings with a much simpler press of a single button. However, the sound became so oversaturated within pop music that it only seemed to be a short-lived fad that fell out of fashion at the turn of the decade. While recordings in the ‘90s slowly began to favour dry drums once again, the gated reverb sound had already made its mark on the history of pop music and inadvertently defined the sound of the ‘80s for better or worse.
While all things fall out of fashion after a while, there’s always every chance that they will come back into fashion as well, and in modern pop music, there are plenty of artists who are beginning to utilise gated reverb again in an attempt to capture a retro feeling within their work. Producers such as Ariel Rechtshaid and Jack Antonoff are both clearly lovers of this ‘80s throwback sound and have used the very same technique on records they’ve produced for the likes of Haim and Lorde, respectively. An accident it may have been, but it is a happy one that can forever claim to have changed the course of recording techniques in pop music forever.
