Daniel Moyler is a London‑based mixing and recording engineer who has recently mixed tracks for Dermot Kennedy and Banners, and has also recorded albums for Dua Lipa, George Ezra and Olivia Dean. Asked to dissect a favourite sound, Moyler focuses on the drum sound from ‘Crowbar’ by Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes.
“This was recorded at The Chapel studios in Lincolnshire. Cam Blackwood, who was producing the record, had made this beat on an 808. We sent that out through a load of Dean Richardson’s guitar pedals, then re‑recorded it back into Pro Tools. It went through an Electro‑Harmonix Clone Theory chorus and vibrato pedal and then into a TC Electronic Sentry Noise Gate before hitting the amp.
“Because Dean uses a lot of fuzz pedals, the gate was really important for keeping it clean. But when we put Cam’s beat through that gate it started cutting into it in a really nice musical way, which is what you can hear at the beginning of ‘Crowbar’. You can hear this kind of ‘tch, tch, tch’, being cut up by the pedals. So that was the basis of the rhythm track. The Rattlesnakes drummer Gareth Grover then played along to that carved‑up 808 beat.”
Dead Space
“The Chapel is literally just one big open old church chapel, so I had to create a dead space. We built this roofed drum den, heavily baffled in the far end of the room, and Gareth smashed out the track in there on his ’60s Premier kit.
“I like to tune the drums to the key of the song where possible so that, if there is any resonance coming off of them, at least it’s musical resonance. That way you can have a more lively, exciting drum sound that sits naturally in the track. For the ambience, I set up a couple of beautiful old AKG C12s as far room mics up in the ceiling end of the chapel. I also used my [STC 4021] ‘ball and biscuit’ mic for a bit of mono crunch. It’s usually taped to the floor somewhere or hanging off of a baffle.
Daniel Moyler: You could get this approximate effect using a digital trigger, but this way sounds more natural and tied to the original drum performance.
“I then re‑recorded the snare. To do this I bused the snare out in parallel, gated this parallel snare really hard — it’s a nasty sounding gate, essentially just a transient — and then sent that out to my Avantone speaker, which I had hovering above the snare drum. So, the transient would set off the snare every time it was hit on the original performance. I then re‑recorded the new snare in the room on its own. This is a great technique for recapturing a clean sound of the snare. I then had a lot of control over the tone of the snare by blending this in with the original. You could get this approximate effect using a digital trigger, but this way sounds more natural and tied to the original drum performance. Also, if you listen hard enough, I’m pretty sure you can hear Frank hitting a crowbar against the studio floor underneath each snare hit. Just don’t tell the studio owners...”