Power Station: Some Like it Hot

[MBrady1967]

Anyone want to help me figure out how to get that sound?  I want the accent drums to be a sequence I can trigger with one hit.  This is for a live performance.

Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.3.7
Operating system: macOS Sonoma (14)

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[Brad]

MBrady1967 wrote:

Anyone want to help me figure out how to get that sound?  I want the accent drums to be a sequence I can trigger with one hit.  This is for a live performance.

Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.3.7
Operating system: macOS Sonoma (14)

Here’s a place to start: This is an interview with Tony Thompson (in my estimation one of the worlds more underated drummers):

“All these years, people wanted to sample me. Everyone always assumed that there was some kind of special knobs turned when we did that first Power Station record. All it basically was, was a brand-new Yamaha kit (which I still play) in a very live, brick, recording studio in London called Mason Rouge. I hit the drums very hard. That’s it! [laughs] We did “Some Like It Hot,” and everyone had all these stories, saying all kinds of things, about tricks that were going on. Samples weren’t even around back then. So, bottom line, the sound came from a good kit, hit hard, in a nice live room.”

I might add that this was around the same time as Phil Collins’ gated reverb sound, I would say there was some “tweaking” with the room mics.

 

Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.3.7
Operating system: macOS Sonoma (14)

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• This post was modified 11 months, 3 weeks ago by Brad.

[thedrumdoctor]

You can get that Power Station sound from the various room mics in SD3 and altering the levels of the components. I did it for a room mic channel and actually named it, ‘Power Station’ for that very reason! An instant Tony Thompson sound is in there for sure.

I still have the vinyl of the 12″ remix of Some Like it Hot lying around somewhere. That particular piece of vinyl was instrumental in alerting me to the limitations of squeezing 5 tracks onto a single side of 12″ plastic. The same track on the Power Station album sounded so compressed in comparison to the 12″ single. It was amazing to hear the difference on the CD release when I could really hear the chemistry between John Taylor and Tony Thompson on all the tracks.

Superior Drummer 3 version: 3.3.7
Operating system: macOS Monterey (12)

thedrumdoctor

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