Does anyone remember this post? I think it was about When The Levee Breaks and how it was recorded. The guy who recorded it posted here. I am dying to read that again. If anyone remembers where it is or what it was called I would appreciate it. Thanks -MattB
Sorry It musta been somewhere else. I figured it was here. I rarely go anywhere else. Maybe it was on the home recording site.
I remember reading something somewhere about how they got Bonzo's drum sound in that... they set him up in a stairwell or hallway, using just a pair of Beyer M160 ribbons... ...found this somewhere: "PAGE: Besides being one of the best drummers I've ever heard, he was also one of the loudest. He was the reason we had to start buying bigger amps. When we recorded "Levee Breaks," we just used a pair of stereo mics in a hallway at Headley Grange. We could've used a separate microphone to mic the bass drum but we didn't need to--his kick sound was that powerful." ...also: http://www.buckeye-web.com/zeptrek97/ scroll near the bottom and you can see a pic of the "Stairway to Heaven" under which he set up his kit.
I read an interview recently, maybe in TapeOp, about the "Levee" drum sound. Big room in a castle. Two Beyer M160s, off the kit. Helios console pres. Tape slap. Oh, and John Bonham... Loudboy
+1. I always imagined the infamous stairway at Healdley Grange to be of massive stone, dripping with nitre and cobwebs. The real thing looks decidedly more tame, verging on suburban!
Ha ha, so did I. I wonder how big the rest of the room is. I heard they used a mobile studio-in-a-truck at Headley Grange, borrowed from the Rolling Stones, and that the Stones used the same truck for Exile on Main St. Here's another Page quote: "The curious thing about Levee, I had the riff and sequence of it and that's about all. Robert had a guide vocal to it. We tried it in two studios and it didn't sound good. If a number didn't work, we'd just move on and try the song the next day. We were working in Headley Grange with a mobile truck. Bonzo had one drum kit in the room we were recording, and a second kit - I think a new drum kit - was set up. He started playing there and I went "hold it!" because there was this massive sound. I said let's mike up the kit and let's start and we started with When the Levee Breaks, as far as I remember. Around this big massive drum sound, the whole thing just settled into what it was, then of course all the overdubs came on, backwards echo and all this sort of stuff."
For fun, I took Chuck Treece (he's a well known session drummer in Philadelphia) to a normal industrial stair well in an insurance company I used to work for. I put him at the bottom and set up a couple of AKG414's in an ORTF pattern up about 15'. The whole thing was concrete and steel. We got about 1 minute of DAT when a security guard came in and shut us down. Anyway, he had a headphone foldback and he hit his snare one time and went nuts. Of course, he started in with Levee because we almost totallly nailed the ambiance though his kit was set up for funk with really tight tunings. Anyway, it's not really a hard sound to get on the recording side. 414's will pick up a pin dropping so if the kick has any tone at all the the drummer plays the kit evenly, it sounds great. Plus it stages and images really cool too because of the simple miking strategy. Later, he called me and was just listening to some stuff and that cue came on and he bolted awake. I think he even called me to rant about how cool it was. Ah, those were some good times we had. I was always like that as an engineer/producer, that is, wanting to try to gorilla record in cool sounding places like parking garages and drain pipes but it was hard to find people who were into the spirit of it.
