Making and animating a 17 minute video in 5 days is no easy task

August 18, 2019 2:24 PM

How a recording-studio mishap shaped '80s music (SLYT), an ode to gated reverb drums and explaining the sound of a decade. This is one of Estelle Caswell's delightful, engaging, and informative videos that center around music and culture for Earworm. Now on it's second season, Estelle and the Earworm team have covered everything from Radiohead and Captain Beefheart to Bruno Mars and Migos in short, well researched videos.

Some of my favorites:

• We measured pop music’s falsetto obsession, bringing some much needed structure to important questions like "is the amount of falsetto in pop music increasing?" with Graphs!
• How J Dilla humanized his MPC3000, or how James Yancy's MPC3000 ended up in National Museum of African American History and Culture
• Why cartoon characters wear gloves
• Burning down the house, the playlist to accompany The ingredients of a classic house track, which explores the genesis of Chicago's post-disco house music
• Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time, a look into the way rappers use wordplay and the beat to make music
• How heavy metal and Satan gave us this sticker, the history of the Tipper Sticker and the PMRC

See all her Earworm work here, or just follow her playlists.

posted by yeahwhatever (25 comments total)

These are excellent. Thanks much for sharing!

I loved the one about aretha & gospel as well.
posted by Thisandthat at 3:10 PM on August 18, 2019

I loooooooooove the Earmworm videos. Every video is like opening a birthday present full of secret knowledge and also the person giving the gift is just as excited by it as you are.
posted by gwint at 3:34 PM on August 18, 2019

an ode to gated reverb drums and explaining the sound of a decade.

obligatory mention that the drum sound in question actually seems to have first hit in 1977 on David Bowie's Low.

Sound and Vision
Speed of Life

... but it's true that the culture didn't really notice it until Gabriel, Steve Lillywhite, Hugh Padgam made their mistake. About which a musician friend recently commented, "Any fool can make a stupid mistake. It takes a genius (or three) to grab it and run with it."
posted by philip-random at 3:50 PM on August 18, 2019 [6 favorites]

A dozen years ago or so, in one of my periodic fits of occupational discontent, I decided that I might want to be a recording engineer and checked out a book about it from the library.

My hazy memory swears that half of it was about recording the snare drum sound. Your singer, important, yeah, sure, get the band on tape, gotta do that, BUT DAT SNARE SOUND
posted by clawsoon at 3:51 PM on August 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

That is not how you pronounce "Padgham". It's more like "pah-jem".

He played me the raw multi-track of "In the Air Tonight" once, and it was startling how the little flaws on the isolated tracks vanished once you mixed them together.

The other big way in which that particular Peter Gabriel album influenced 80s drums is that Peter refused to let Phil Collins use cymbals.
posted by w0mbat at 3:55 PM on August 18, 2019 [8 favorites]

I never knew what that sound was called but I definitely remember hearing that Gabriel album for the first time and being blown away by the drums and I also remember being sick to death of 80's style drums about half-way into that decade.
posted by octothorpe at 4:10 PM on August 18, 2019

Padgham & Lillywhite engineered & produced XTC’s Black Sea at about the same time, & the drums on it were recorded in just about the same way. I don’t know if they were working on them simultaneously, but Dave Gregory Of XTC appears on 2 songs on Peter Gabriel III. The two albums are sonically identical, except they didn’t take Terry Chambers’ cymbals away.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:32 PM on August 18, 2019 [2 favorites]

Dave Gregory Of XTC appears on 2 songs on Peter Gabriel III

wow, I did not know this
posted by thelonius at 5:58 PM on August 18, 2019 [1 favorite]

David Bowie's Low does sound a bit like gated reverb but it is actually an Eventide Harmonizer
posted by bhnyc at 6:36 PM on August 18, 2019 [8 favorites]

More threads like this please.
posted by Young Kullervo at 6:37 PM on August 18, 2019 [3 favorites]

My hazy memory swears that half of it was about recording the snare drum sound. Your singer, important, yeah, sure, get the band on tape, gotta do that, BUT DAT SNARE SOUND

My impression is that, like a lot of things, being a recording engineer follows the 80/20 law, but in this case it just means you spend 80% of your effort miking drums.
posted by invitapriore at 8:44 PM on August 18, 2019

guyz guyz i know what we need
what we need is gated reverb
and AUTOTUNE
posted by flabdablet at 10:40 PM on August 18, 2019

I can distinctly remember being blown away by the drums in “Lay Your Hands on Me”... but yeah, it was cool, and after a while everyone was doing it. Not special anymore just derivative and it got old fast.
posted by Meatbomb at 12:29 AM on August 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

These are great, thanks, I'm sure I'll end up watching them all. I clicked on the greatest rhymers link to see what they said about Rakim and was not disappointed. Very informative break down of rhyming patterns, and I'm off to investigate some MF Doom...
posted by newpotato at 2:40 AM on August 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

I was surprised she went straight from plate reverb to the RMX-16, skipping the spring reverb most guitarists had access to- cheap, simple, & light.
Drums could be run through an amp with spring reverb. (But probably not gated as easily as with digital)
posted by MtDewd at 6:53 AM on August 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

80s drum sound! Now I know what it's actually called.

Still hate it.
posted by freakazoid at 8:05 AM on August 19, 2019 [1 favorite]

Earworm is great. When the falsetto one came out a few days ago, I was excited for a data-wank deep-dive, but then it turned out they were relying on the various streaming services' metadata that distinguishes between "falsetto" and "head voice", terms that (a) don't have universally agreed-upon definitions, and (b) are probably two overlapping phenomena you can't easily distinguish by listening. (Short version: traditional vocal pedagogy is prescientific and doesn't entirely line up with what we now know about experimental articulatory phonetics. For example, traditional pedagogy doesn't acknowledge the existence of a female falsetto, but women are perfectly capable of making the same articulatory gesture that male falsetto singers are doing.)
posted by The Tensor at 9:16 AM on August 19, 2019

The gloves video was kind of weak. They explained the minstrel history, but they kept cutting in on Olive Oyl as part of the character design cost explanation while the main Popeye doesn't wear gloves. I mean, maybe the point could have been made that side characters wear gloves to constrain the cost of the animation. But mains and sides seem to wear gloves 100% as character design decisions.

So I posit that white gloves simply made their hands more expressive, animation economics came in later as a justification.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:22 AM on August 19, 2019

Also hearing dry drums on tracks in the 1990s after a solid decade of songs overflowing with gated reverb sounded so different and so crazy.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:25 AM on August 19, 2019

Still hate it.

as meatbomb mentions above, the SOUND was at first quite amazing. Many first heard it via Phil Collins' In The Air Tonight, which I sincerely doubt would have been anything near the hit that it was had it ...

A. not had those drums coming in like the eruption of Krakatoa, and/or
B. not been something they'd NEVER heard before ...

because man, did I come to hate it, and fairly quickly. The 80s being one of the most conformist decades on record, so the SOUND quickly became essential, you couldn't even be in the game if you didn't have that SOUND. So suddenly every drum was hitting you like a kick to the head with apparently no thought given as to whether it was actually serving the record in question. It became very easy to just turn off the radio.

The 90s have a lot of sins to answer for themselves, but at least they gave us back (in a pop sense) drum and percussion producing (and programming) that allowed for subtlety.
posted by philip-random at 9:28 AM on August 19, 2019 [4 favorites]

I was surprised she went straight from plate reverb to the RMX-16, skipping the spring reverb most guitarists had access to- cheap, simple, & light.
Drums could be run through an amp with spring reverb. (But probably not gated as easily as with digital)

Spring reverb (talking about big studio units like The Great British Spring) sounds good on most things, but with drums you get a boingy sproingy kind of sound that most people don't like. You hear it on dub reggae a lot.
The deluxe Hugh Padgham sound uses real reverb from combining close mics with far mics in a lively big room, and then you get the easier version with digital reverbs (which started expensive but got cheap quickly), and then the even easier version of samples with the manipulated reverb already baked in.
posted by w0mbat at 11:27 AM on August 19, 2019 [2 favorites]

I could seriously watch this kind of thing all day long - thanks for the tip!!!
posted by tantrumthecat at 7:25 PM on August 19, 2019

I've always been a bit skeptical of this reverb "accident" story, but people seem to love it. Everything you record you decide how much or how little ambience you want on it, and in the 80's the answer was "as much as possible". The new part of the sound was the gate on the reverb, so that it didn't turn into a swamp. Most recording "inventions" are really things that other people heard and didn't like, they said "that's too much" and then someone else said "no, that's not too much" and went for it.

It's not just the gated reverb, which is what people point to, it's that the snare and toms are the loudest thing in the track. There are lots of 80's tracks where you can't even hear the kick or cymbals. Something's gotta go.

The amount of ambience on drums, and everything else, swings back and forth every few years from people trying to sound fresh.

The Hollies - Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress - 1972
posted by bongo_x at 2:34 PM on August 20, 2019

I like how they wrap up the falsetto one. I was watching that thinking "You were surprised there was more in the 70's and 80's?"
posted by bongo_x at 2:53 PM on August 20, 2019

I meant to add, maybe people don't realize the 90's through the early 2000's was actually a sort of unusual period of a lot of low male voices. It was a different sound at the time and definitely a thing.
posted by bongo_x at 3:32 PM on August 20, 2019